Graviton Propagator

and
Newton’s Law
Zayid Ahmed
MSc Physics
18510096
Outline

1) Gravitational Field

2) Graviton Propagator

3) Newton’s Law
Introduction
Gravity can be treated on the same footing as the other interactions, the
gravitational interaction is much weaker than other other interaction.

The graviton couples to anything carrying energy and momentum, and it certainly
carries energy and momentum.

The graviton may be regarded as just another elementary particle like the photon,
and its spin is 2.
Gravity as a field theory
The Einstein-Hilbert action for gravity in weak field limit is

Where

The Riemann curvature tensor

The Riemann tensor is constructed out of Riemann-Cristoffel symbol

The Ricci tensor is defined by and the scalar curvature by

Gravity as a field theory
The full invariant action is where the second term includes
energy-momentum tensor which tells us about the graviton coupling with matter.

Varying action gives us the equations of motion,

• gives the source of the gravitational field.

• gives the dynamics of the gravitational field.

Weak field approximation and propagator
For the weak field gravity let us write

Where denotes the flat Minkowski metric and the deviation from the flat
matric.

The field describes a graviton in flat spacetime.

Using this in the action and suppressing the indices:

continue...
The first term governs how the graviton propagates.

Higher order terms describe the coupling of graviton with itself.

Now we are ready to tackle the indices, after calculating the ricci tensor, the action is:

Where

We see that by adding ,This allows us to impose the so called Harmonic

gauge condition
Propagator
Action becomes:

It is convenient to introduce the following identity tensor,

This produces an equation of motion

From this equations we can easily extract the Green function of the gravitational field
hµν.
continue...
Using , yields

This gives us the propagator

Newton’s Law
The Euler-Lagrange equation of motion is:

Taking the trace we end up:

So we obtain:

In the static limit, is the dominant component of the stress-energy tensor.

Thus the above equation reduces to:

Where is the Newtonian Gravitational potential for which we have derived

Poisson’s eqaution.
Refrences
1) Quantum theory in a nutshell, A. Zee
2) http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=8956258&fileOId=8956261
3) https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.00319.pdf
THANK YOU