English

Spin precession in the strong deflection limit

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2026-07-28 v1

Abstract

The strong deflection limit (SDL) of the deflection angle is well established for general spherically symmetric spacetimes, but a systematic SDL treatment of spin precession has been lacking. We derive the SDL expansion for the spin precession angle of particles propagating along geodesics in static, spherically symmetric, and asymptotically flat spacetimes. The SDL coefficients are obtained, and a simple relation linking the precession angle to the deflection one is established. Applying the formalism to Schwarzschild and Reissner-Nordstr\"om (RN) spacetimes, we obtain fully analytic SDL coefficients for the former and perturbative charge corrections to O(Q2)\mathcal{O}(Q^2) for the latter. These results explicitly verify the universal spin-flip of massless particles in backward scattering, which is the underlying mechanism governing the absence of the glory spot. While the spin precession of massless particles is charge-independent, massive particles acquire a non-trivial charge dependence that distinguishes the RN case from Schwarzschild.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.25617,
  title  = {Spin precession in the strong deflection limit},
  author = {Jiafei Geng and Yunchuan Xiang and Qingquan Jiang and Xiankai Pang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.25617},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

22 pages, 6 figures; comments welcome