Light-like Scattering in Quantum Gravity
Abstract
We consider scattering in quantum gravity and derive long-range classical and quantum contributions to the scattering of light-like bosons and fermions (spin-0, spin-1/2, spin-1) from an external massive scalar field, such as the Sun or a black hole. This is achieved by treating general relativity as an effective field theory and identifying the non-analytic pieces of the one-loop gravitational scattering amplitude. It is emphasized throughout the paper how modern amplitude techniques, involving spinor-helicity variables, unitarity, and squaring relations in gravity enable much simplified computations. We directly verify, as predicted by general relativity, that all classical effects in our computation are universal (in the context of matter type and statistics). Using an eikonal procedure we confirm the post-Newtonian general relativity correction for light-like bending around large stellar objects. We also comment on treating effects from quantum hbar dependent terms using the same eikonal method.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1609.07477,
title = {Light-like Scattering in Quantum Gravity},
author = {N. E. J. Bjerrum-Bohr and John F. Donoghue and Barry R. Holstein and Ludovic Plante and Pierre Vanhove},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.07477},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
latex 31 pages. 5 feynmp figures. v2: Clarifications on conventions and notations. Minors changes and latex format update. v3: A sign mistake corrected and various typos corrected