Gravitational-recoil effects on fermion propagation in space-time foam (Q1596263)

In the present paper the interaction of high-energy fermions with space-time foam is discussed. The authors thereby extend their previous D-brane model of quantum-gravitational vacuum fluctuations in order to include fermions. For this they develop an appropriate supersymmetric Born-Infeld effective action. The authors demonstrate that a high-energy fermion scattering off a D-brane in space-time induces a linear deformation of the background metric. As it turns out this is analogous to that induced by a high-engergy boson, if gravitational recoil effects are taken into account. Moreover, as the authors point out, their formal description points to an interesting analogous condensed-matter system. Finally, the authors also discuss the phenomenological implications for the observability of high-energy neutrino pulses from different astrophysical sources.