2024/10/02 by Duojie Jimu, Jimu, Duojie, Tomislav Prokopec +1 · 1 citation
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2410.01449
openalex publication_date 2024/10/02 · openalex created_date 2024/10/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The fact that graviton propagator contains not only one but two tensorial components excludes a unique definition of the running behavior of the gravitational constant, while at low energies gravitation is characterized solely by Newton's constant. How these two facts are reconciled when massive quantum fields are present remains unanswered. In this work, by non-minimally coupling gravity to a one-loop massive scalar, we show that this potential conflict is resolved by the non-trivial equivalence between the residues of the two propagator components. Such equivalence, crucial for the validity of the Appelquist-Carazzone decoupling theorem, is based on a rather subtle connection between the spin-2 and spin-0 sectors of the propagator. It is verified that this connection also makes the two quantum-corrected gravitational potentials be characterized by the same gravitational constant at large distances. In addition, we find that the potentials in our case as well as the quantum-corrected Coulomb potential can be expressed concisely in a unified formulation. By comparing these results with experiments, we establish a new upper bound on the magnitude of the non-minimal coupling parameter ξ.