Light deflection in Weyl gravity: critical distances for photon paths

Abstract

The Weyl gravity appears to be a very peculiar theory. The contribution of the Weyl linear parameter to the effective geodesic potential is opposite for massive and nonmassive geodesics. However, photon geodesics do not depend on the unknown conformal factor, unlike massive geodesics. Hence light deflection offers an interesting test of the Weyl theory. In order to investigate light deflection in the setting of Weyl gravity, we first distinguish between a weak field and a strong field approximation. Indeed, the Weyl gravity does not turn off asymptotically and becomes even stronger at larger distances. We then take full advantage of the conformal invariance of the photon effective potential to provide the key radial distances in Weyl gravity. According to those, we analyze the weak and strong field regime for light deflection. We further show some amazing features of the Weyl theory in the strong regime.

20 pages, 9 figures (see published version for a better resolution, or online version at stacks.iop.org/CQG/21/1897)

References in corpus (4)

• The Confrontation between General Relativity and Experiment
• Local and global gravity
• Open Questions in Classical Gravity
• Causal Structure of Vacuum Solutions to Conformal(Weyl) Gravity

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