Gravitational Dressing of Aharonov-Bohm Amplitudes

Abstract

We investigate Aharonov-Bohm scattering in a theory in which charged bosonic matter fields are coupled to topologically massive electrodynamics and topologically massive gravity. We demonstrate that, at one-loop order, the transmuted spins in this theory are related to the ones of ordinary Chern-Simons gauge theory in the same way that the Knizhnik-Polyakov-Zamolodchikov formula relates the Liouville-dressed conformal weights of primary operators to the bare weights in two-dimensional conformal field theories. We remark on the implications of this connection between two-dimensional conformal field theories and three-dimensional gauge and gravity theories for a topological membrane reformulation of strings. We also discuss some features of the gravitational analog of the Aharonov-Bohm effect.