Strong gravitational lensing effects of black holes with quantum hair

Abstract: According to the no-hair theorem, stationary black holes are uniquely characterized by their mass, charge, and angular momentum. In this paper, we explore quantum hair by deriving the quantum-corrected black hole metric within the Barvinsky-Vilkovisky formalism. The quantum-corrected metric is obtained perturbatively around flat spacetime without assuming either the commutativity between the nonlocal operator and covariant derivatives or the nonlocal Gauss-Bonnet theorem, both of which are adopted in previous studies. Using this metric, we evaluate the deflection angle in the strong-field limit and compute the associated strong gravitational lensing observables, such as the angular separation and the relative magnification. Our results show that as the quantum hair, determined by the number of virtual massless quantum fields in the nonlocal effective action, increases, the photon sphere radius, the strong deflection angle, and the relative magnification all increase, whereas the angular separation decreases. In addition, the role of quantum hair is discussed in the weak and strong naked singularities. As a result, we demonstrate that the quantum hair affects not only the black hole geometry but also its strong gravitational lensing effects.