Behavior of light polarization in photon-scalar interaction

Abstract

Quantum theories of gravity help us to improve our insight into the gravitational interactions. Motivated by the interesting effect of gravity on the photon trajectory, we treat a quantum recipe concluding a classical interaction of light and a massive object such as the sun. We use the linear quantum gravity to compute the classical potential of a photon interacting with a massive scalar. The leading terms have a traditional $1/r$ subordinate and demonstrate a polarization-dependent behavior. This result challenges the equivalence principle; attractive and/or repulsive interactions are admissible.