A new theory of tensor-scalar gravity coupled to Aharonov—Bohm electrodynamics

Abstract

Tensor-scalar theories of gravitation are commonly employed as extensions of General Relativity that allow to describe a much wider phenomenology. They are also naturally generated as low energy limits of higher-dimensional or unified theories, and the gravitational scalar components can represent quantum corrections to the Einstein theory. The coupling of the scalars to an e.m. field does not introduce any relevant new physics if the e.m. action has the usual Maxwell form, implying a vanishing trace of the e.m. energy–momentum tensor. In the case of the extended Aharonov–Bohm electrodynamics, some interesting new situations are possible, which in this work are analyzed in the gravitational weak-field approximation and for a basic version of tensor-scalar gravity involving only a Brans–Dicke field plus another scalar. Since Aharonov–Bohm theory differs from Maxwell theory only in the presence of anomalous sources with local violation of charge conservation, which is thought to be possible only at a quantum level, the resulting formal framework can be useful for modeling interactions between gravitational and physical systems with macroscopic quantization. The theory contains some unknown parameters, the most important being the vacuum expectation value (VEV) ψ0 of the second gravitational scalar and the level γ of violation of local charge conservation in the e.m. sector. An attempt is made to relate these parameters to some experimental constraints. However, presently there is much space left for uncertainty.