A Polarizable Vacuum Approach to Infrared Gravitational Halos

This work develops an effective description in which the infrared sector of the quantum vacuum is treated as a polarizable medium responding non–locally to an externally generated gravitational potential. Within this framework, halo–like gravitational effects arise as an induced vacuum contribution rather than from additional particulate matter. The analysis shows that such an infrared vacuum response becomes dynamically effective only when the gravitational field is dominated by a sufficiently isolated potential well, which acts as a coherence seed for long–wavelength modes. This coherence requirement naturally suppresses halo–like behavior in intrinsically multi–centered systems such as galaxy clusters, while allowing extended halos to develop around galaxies. The response is formulated in terms of a linear susceptibility constrained by observed galactic scaling relations, with its normalization fixed by the empirical acceleration scale a0a₀a0 and no additional free parameters. The framework leads to testable predictions concerning environmental dependence and the spatial extent of infrared vacuum halos.