Worldline formalism in a gravitational background

Abstract

We analyze the worldline formalism in the presence of a gravitational background. In the worldline formalism a path integral is used to quantize the worldline coordinates of the particles. Contrary to the simpler cases of scalar and vector backgrounds, external gravity requires a precise definition of the ultraviolet regularization of the path integral. Taking into account the UV regularization, we describe the first quantized representation of the one-loop effective action for a scalar particle. We compute explicitly the contribution to the graviton tadpole and self-energy to test the validity of the method. The results obtained by usual field theoretical Feynman diagrams are reproduced in an efficient way. Finally, we comment on the technical problems related to the factorization of the zero mode from the path integral on the circle.