Extending Gibbons-Werner method to bound orbits of massive particles

TL;DR

This paper extends the Gibbons-Werner method to bound massive particle orbits in Schwarzschild spacetime by dividing orbits into segments and modifying the region construction, providing an analytical deflection angle expression.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to calculate gravitational deflection angles for bound massive particles using an adapted Gibbons-Werner method.

Findings

Successfully derived an analytical expression for the deflection angle.

Extended the Gibbons-Werner method to bound orbits.

Demonstrated the method with Schwarzschild spacetime.

Abstract

The Gibbons-Werner method for the gravitational deflection angle of unbound particles in static spherically symmetric spacetimes is based on Jacobi metric and Gauss-Bonnet theorem. When it is extended to bound massive particles, there exists two difficulties: (a) Bound orbits may overlap with themselves azimuthally. To extend the definition of deflection angle for unbound orbits to bound orbits, we divide the bound orbit into multiple segments such that each segment does not overlap with itself azimuthally and can be regarded as an unbound orbit. (b) The infinite region constructed for unbound orbits in Gibbons-Werner method is invalid for bound orbits, since the Jacobi metric of bound massive particles is singular at far region. To construct a suitable region for bound orbits, we adopt the generalized Gibbons-Werner method proposed in our last work [Huang and Cao, https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.106.104043], so that the unphysical region in Jacobi space is avoided. What's more, taking the Schwarzschild spacetime as an example, we show the details of the calculation and obtain an analytical expression of the deflection angle between two arbitrary points on the orbit.