English

Scattering amplitudes in dimensionless quadratic gravity coupled to QED

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-04-06 v2

Abstract

We study ultra-Planckian 222\to2 scattering in an Abelian gauge theory coupled to agravity, the scale-free and renormalizable realization of quadratic quantum gravity. Focusing on charged fermions and scalars interacting with the photon and the higher-derivative graviton, we present compact analytic expressions for the unpolarized squared matrix elements for a broad set of tree-level processes, including photon--photon, fermion--fermion, fermion--photon, scalar--fermion, scalar--photon, scalar--scalar, and annihilation channels. In contrast to purely graviton-mediated analyses, we retain systematically the photon--graviton interference contributions and verify explicitly the independence of the results on the gravitational gauge-fixing parameter. The amplitudes display characteristic forward/backward enhancements associated with small momentum transfer, amplified by the 1/p41/p^{4} graviton propagator, while their high-energy scaling reflects the underlying dimensionless gravitational couplings. Moreover, for all channels analyzed the corresponding differential cross sections exhibit the universal ultra-Planckian scaling dσ/dΩ1/sd\sigma/d\Omega \propto 1/s, where ss is the Mandelstam invariant (the squared center-of-momentum energy). Our results furnish a unified amplitude-level description of how higher-derivative gravity reshapes familiar QED scattering at ultra-Planckian energies and provide analytic building blocks for further studies of IR definitions and UV consistency in agravity with matter.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.05476,
  title  = {Scattering amplitudes in dimensionless quadratic gravity coupled to QED},
  author = {I. F. Cunha and A. C. Lehum},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.05476},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

19 pages, 8 figures. v2 Minor corrections

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:05:25.265Z