English

Bending of Light in Quantum Gravity

High Energy Physics - Theory 2017-04-20 v3 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We consider the scattering of lightlike matter in the presence of a heavy scalar object (such as the Sun or a Schwarzschild black hole). By treating general relativity as an effective field theory we directly compute the nonanalytic components of the one-loop gravitational amplitude for the scattering of massless scalars or photons from an external massive scalar field. These results allow a semiclassical computation of the bending angle for light rays grazing the Sun, including long-range \hbar contributions. We discuss implications of this computation, in particular the violation of some classical formulations of the equivalence principle.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1410.7590,
  title  = {Bending of Light in Quantum Gravity},
  author = {N. E. J. Bjerrum-Bohr and John F. Donoghue and Barry R. Holstein and Ludovic Planté and Pierre Vanhove},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1410.7590},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

5 pages, 1 figure, v2: typos corrected, version to be published in PRL, v3: signs corrected

R2 v1 2026-06-22T06:38:32.253Z