FACTORIZATION AND POLARIZATION IN LINEARIZED GRAVITY

We investigate all the four-body graviton interaction processes: gX→γX, gX→gX, and gg→gg with X as an elementary particle of spin less than 2 in the context of linearized gravity except the spin-3/2 case. We show explicitly that gravitational gauge invariance and Lorentz invariance cause every four-body graviton scattering amplitude to be factorized. We explore the implications of this factorization property by investigating polarization effects through the covariant density matrix formalism in each four-body graviton scattering process. © 1995 The American Physical Society.