Massive Scalar Corrections to Gravitational Potentials in the On-Shell Renormalization Scheme (2410.01449v1)

Abstract: We calculate the one-loop corrections induced by a non-minimally coupled massive scalar to the two gravitational potentials sourced by a static point mass in Minkowski space via solving the effective Einstein field equations. We first obtain a manifestly transverse graviton self-energy and, by performing resummation of the bubble diagrams, derive the associated dressed graviton propagator in the general covariant gauge. For one class of gauges, which include the Landau gauge, the dressed graviton propagator becomes proportional to the tree-level propagator in the on-shell limit. This fact allows us to employ the on-shell renormalization scheme so that the renormalized Newton constant $G$ takes the value measured in the experiments. The resulting corrections to the gravitational potentials share similar structures with the vacuum polarization correction to the Coulomb potential regarding their analytic expressions and long distance behavior. By comparing our results with gravitational slip measurements, we establish a constraint on the non-minimal coupling: $|\xi| \lesssim 5\times 10^{43}/\sqrt{N}$, where $N$ is the number of scalar fields.