Experimental Proposal -- Confirmation of a Dielectric Longitudinal Delay of a Bright Interference Fringe
Preferred Frame Writing — April 2026
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One-Sentence Summary
At Mach-Zehnder recombination each arm beam is the in-phase electromagnetic response to the other, so the dielectric slowing mechanism applies directly and the bright fringe propagates at c/2.
Summary
Electromagnetic propagation in a dielectric slows because the medium's polarization response is an in-phase electromagnetic wave that loads the effective permittivity and permeability. At Mach-Zehnder recombination the second arm beam plays that role: both arms originate from the same coherent source and arrive in phase, making each beam the full-amplitude in-phase response to the other (k=1), which gives c_eff = c/2 by the standard dielectric formula. The ordinary output reading takes the routed output beam and predicts no delay. Two experiments discriminate the readings: refraction of the isolated bright fringe at a glass boundary — where the loaded reading predicts total internal reflection above the critical angle sin(theta_c) = n_g/2 ~ 0.75 — and time-of-flight along a propagation path.
Keywords
Keywords: interference, Mach-Zehnder interferometer, dielectric slowing, dielectric longitudinal delay, constructive interference, energy density, bright interference fringe, refraction, Snell's law, total internal reflection, time-of-flight, speed of light