Violation of angular momentum selection rules in quantum gravity

A simple consequence of the angular momentum conservation in quantum field theories is that the interference of s-channel amplitudes exchanging particles with different spin J vanishes after complete angular integration. We show that, while this rule holds in scattering processes mediated by a massive graviton in quantum gravity, a massless graviton s-channel exchange breaks orthogonality when considering its interference with a scalar-particle s-channel exchange, whenever all the external states are massive. As a consequence, we find that, in the Einstein theory, unitarity implies that angular momentum is not conserved at quantum level in the graviton coupling to massive matter fields. This result can be interpreted as a new anomaly, revealing unknown aspects of the well-known van Dam-Veltman-Zakharov discontinuity. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.