Sagnac effect of Gödel's universe (Q1768449)

The paper is devoted to the Sagnac effect of Gödel's Universe. Exact expressions for the Sagnac effect are presented. For this purpose, the authors derive a formula for the Sagnac time delay along a circular path in the presence of an arbitrary stationary metric in cylindrical coordinates. This result is applied to the Gödel's metric for two different experimental situations: First, the light source and the detector are at rest relative to the matter generating the gravitational field. In this case, an expression is formally equivalent to the familiar nonrelativistic Sagnac time delay. Second, the light source and the detector are at rest relative to the matter. Here it is shown that for a special rotation rate of the detector the Sagnac time delay vanishes. The authors propose a formulation of the Sagnac time delay in terms of invariant physical quantities. It turns out that the result is very close to the analogous formula of the Sagnac time delay of a rotating coordinate system in Minkowski spacetime.