The Coherence Projection Principle

Abstract

This work develops the Coherence Projection Principle, a local higher-dimensional gauge framework in which ordinary electromagnetism, reciprocal electromagnetic memory, dissipation, and an axion-like cosmological sector arise as different projections of a single parent gauge field defined over spacetime and an internal coherence coordinate. The visible photon is identified with the zero mode, while orthogonal internal modes generate reciprocal vector fields whose coupling to electromagnetism can be activated locally by material coherence. Vacuum orthogonality suppresses mixing in empty space, while positivity of the parent kinetic measure yields the four-dimensional stability bound automatically. Integrating out hidden modes with a closed-time-path formalism produces causal retarded response kernels. Their spectral structure separates three regimes: local effective-field-theory corrections, coherent non-Markovian reciprocal response, and dissipative dynamics accompanied by noise. A Wilson-line degree of freedom of the same parent gauge field provides an axion-like scalar with a possible electromagnetic Chern–Simons coupling and associated cosmic-birefringence signature. The laboratory reciprocal sector and the optional identification of this scalar with dark energy are explicitly separated. The paper derives exact flat-circle relations between the first reciprocal-vector mass, compactification radius, four-dimensional gauge coupling, and Wilson-line decay constant, exposing a single-scale rigidity that any simultaneous laboratory–cosmological completion must overcome. Warped geometries, localized kinetic structures, multiple internal scales, protected low modes, and exponentially suppressed nonlocal Wilson-line potentials are identified as possible completion mechanisms. The framework is formulated to be falsifiable through material-state dependence, causal phase response, common propagation parameters, dispersion relations, and associated noise constraints.