Gravitational helicity interaction

Abstract

For gravitational deflections of massless particles of given helicity from a classical rotating body, we describe the general relativity corrections to the geometric optics approximation. We compute the corresponding scattering cross sections for neutrinos, photons and gravitons to lowest order in the gravitational coupling constant. We find that the helicity coupling to spacetime geometry modifies the ray deflection formula of the geometric optics, so that rays of different helicity are deflected by different amounts. We also discuss the validity range of the Born approximation.