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).
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