English

Gravitational lensing in a plasma from worldlines

High Energy Physics - Theory 2025-04-15 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We study the deflection of light rays in a cold, non-magnetized plasma using the worldline framework. Starting from Synge's Hamiltonian formalism, we construct a position-space action and use it perturbatively to calculate light bending angles. In the homogeneous case, the action reduces to that of a massive particle, allowing us to extract the bending angle of light in the presence of the medium using a well-known analogy. For the inhomogeneous case, we consider a power law model and construct Feynman rules in time to compute the purely plasma-induced corrections to the bending angle at Next-to-Leading-Order (NLO).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.14126,
  title  = {Gravitational lensing in a plasma from worldlines},
  author = {Francesco Comberiati and Leonardo de la Cruz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.14126},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

10 pages, 1 figure; v2: references added, Fig.1 replaced, matches published version

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:40:55.867Z