Photon Surfaces in Higher-Curvature Gravity: Implications for Quasinormal Modes and Gravitational Lensing

TL;DR

This paper explores how higher-curvature corrections in effective field theory modify photon sphere properties, gravitational lensing, and quasinormal modes, providing potential observational tests for deviations from general relativity.

Contribution

It derives the impact of EFT-based higher-curvature corrections on strong-field gravitational observables like lensing and QNMs, highlighting their potential to constrain quantum gravity effects.

Findings

Deviations from GR alter photon sphere radius and impact parameter.

Strong deflection coefficients are sensitive to higher-curvature terms.

Precision lensing and QNM measurements can constrain EFT couplings.

Abstract

Effective field theory (EFT) provides a systematic framework to describe possible deviations from general relativity through higher-curvature corrections to the gravitational action, capturing low-energy effects of an underlying fundamental theory. In this work, we investigate quasinormal modes (QNMs) and both weak and strong gravitational lensing in static, spherically symmetric spacetimes, focusing on the behavior of null geodesics near the photon sphere. Adopting the strong deflection limit formalism developed by Bozza, we derive the logarithmic divergence structure of the deflection angle and explicitly separate the divergent and regular contributions. Within a simplified setup with $2M=1$, we analyze how deviations from general relativity, parametrized in an EFT framework, modify key observables such as the photon sphere radius, the critical impact parameter, and the coefficients governing the strong deflection expansion. We show that these quantities encode direct information about higher-curvature corrections to the gravitational action. Our results demonstrate that strong-field observables provide a sensitive probe of EFT corrections, and that precision measurements of gravitational lensing and QNM spectra could place constraints on EFT couplings beyond general relativity, offering a novel observational window into quantum gravity-inspired effects.