Force carrier particle trajectories and warped spacetime

[jaketodd]

Do force carriers follow the curvature of spacetime, or do they travel in perfectly straight lines?

With black holes, gravity of course exists, so I'm thinking the force carriers (at least gravitons) don't follow spacetime curvature, since they would never escape the event horizon.

Sounds like one of the paradoxes of relativity vs. quantum mechanics.

I tried to find a paper on this at arxiv and google scholar, but there don't seem to be any.

Thanks,

Jake

 

[PeterDonis]

Do force carriers follow the curvature of spacetime, or do they travel in perfectly straight lines?

Force carriers do not have well-defined worldlines, so the question is not well posed. Even thinking of force carriers as "particles" at all has serious limitations; look up the PF Insights articles on "virtual particles".

With black holes, gravity of course exists, so I'm thinking the force carriers (at least gravitons) don't follow spacetime curvature, since they would never escape the event horizon.

Wrong. See here:

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/BlackHoles/black_gravity.html

 

[PeterDonis]

I tried to find a paper on this at arxiv and google scholar, but there don't seem to be any.

You would be much better served by taking the time to learn the basics of GR, QM, and QFT from textbooks, rather than making random Internet searches for answers to random questions that pop into your mind. Without at least a basic level of understanding, you won't know what questions to ask or what terms to search for. There's a reason why people who study these fields learn them from textbooks. There are no shortcuts.