Gravitational Correction to Vacuum Polarization
arXiv:1501.07305 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.91.022112
Abstract
We consider the gravitational correction to (electronic) vacuum polarization in the presence of a gravitational background field. The Dirac propagators for the virtual fermions are modified to include the leading gravitational correction (potential term) which corresponds to a coordinate-dependent fermion mass. The mass term is assumed to be uniform over a length scale commensurate with the virtual electron-positron pair. The on-mass shell renormalization condition ensures that the gravitational correction vanishes on the mass shell of the photon, i.e., the speed of light is unaffected by the quantum field theoretical loop correction, in full agreement with the equivalence principle. Nontrivial corrections are obtained for off-shell, virtual photons. We compare our findings to other works on generalized Lorentz transformations and combined quantum-electrodynamic gravitational corrections to the speed of light which have recently appeared in the literature.
arXiv comment9 pages; RevTeX; typographical errors corrected and references added
References in corpus (23)
- The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment
- CPT Violation and the Standard Model
- The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment
- The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment
- Signals for Lorentz Violation in Post-Newtonian Gravity
- Matter-gravity couplings and Lorentz violation
- Neutrinos with Lorentz-violating operators of arbitrary dimension
- New Constraints on Neutrino Velocities
- New two-sided bound on the isotropic Lorentz-violating parameter of modified Maxwell theory
- Perturbative Lorentz and CPT violation for neutrino and antineutrino oscillations
- Determination of the relativistic parameter gamma using very long baseline interferometry
- Bounding Isotropic Lorentz Violation Using Synchrotron Losses at LEP
- Time-delay and Doppler tests of the Lorentz symmetry of gravity
- Particle-accelerator constraints on isotropic modifications of the speed of light
- Localizability of Tachyonic Particles and Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay
- Solutions of the Maxwell equations and photon wave functions
- Nonrelativistic Limit of the Dirac-Schwarzschild Hamiltonian: Gravitational Zitterbewegung and Gravitational Spin-Orbit Coupling
- Coordinate-space approach to vacuum polarization
- Apparent Correction to the Speed of Light in a Gravitational Potential
- Gravitationally Coupled Dirac Equation for Antimatter
- Fine-Structure Constant for Gravitational and Scalar Interactions
- Neutrino Helicity Reversal and Fundamental Symmetries
- From Dirac theories in curved space-times to a Variation of Dirac's large-number hypothesis