The late-time tail behaviors of massive scalar fields are examined analytically in the background of a black hole with a global monopole. It is found that the presence of a solid deficit angle in the background metric makes the massive scalar fields decay faster in the intermediate times. However, the asymptotically late-time tail is not affected and it has the same decay rate of t25/6 as in the Schwarzschild and nearly extreme Reissner-Nordstrom backgrounds.

The quantum light-cone fluctuations in flat spacetimes with compactified spatial dimensions or with boundaries are examined. The discussion is based upon a model in which the source of the underlying metric fluctuations is taken to be quantized linear perturbations of the gravitational field. General expressions are derived, in the transverse trace-free gauge, for the summation of graviton polarization tensors, and for vacuum graviton two-point functions. Because of the fluctuating light cone, the flight time of photons between a source and a detector may be either longer or shorter than the light propagation time in the background classical spacetime. We calculate the mean deviations from the classical propagation time of photons due to the changes in the topology of the flat spacetime. These deviations are in general larger in the directions in which topology changes occur and are typically of the order of the Planck time, but they can get larger as the travel distance increases.

Using Visser's semianalytical model for the stress-energy tensor corresponding to the conformally coupled massless scalar field in the Unruh vacuum, we examine, by explicitly evaluating the relevant integrals over half-complete geodesics, the averaged weak and averaged null energy conditions along with Ford-Roman quantum inequality-type restrictions on negative energy in the context of four-dimensional evaporating black hole backgrounds. We find that in all cases where the averaged energy conditions fail, there exist quantum inequality bounds on the magnitude and duration of negative energy densities.

We discuss how compactified extra dimensions may have potentially observable effects which grow as the compactification scale decreases. This arises because of lightcone fluctuations in the uncompactified dimensions which can result in the broadening of the spectral lines from distant sources. We analyze this effect in a five dimensional model, and argue that data from gamma ray burst sources require the compactification length to be greater than about 105cm in this model.

Energy densities of the quantum states that are superposition of two multi-electron-positron states are examined. It is shown that the energy densities can be negative when two multi-particle states have the same number of electrons and positrons or when one state has one more electron-positron pair than the other. In the cases in which negative energy could arise, we find that the energy is that of a positive constant plus a propagating part which oscillates between positive and negative, and the energy can dip to negative at some places for a certain period of time if the quantum states are properly manipulated. It is demonstrated that the negative energy densities satisfy the quantum inequality. Our results also reveal that for a given particle content, the detection of negative energy is an operation that depends on the frame where any measurement is to be performed. This suggests that the sign of energy density for a quantum state may be a coordinate-dependent quantity in quantum theory.