Gravitons vs Attraction Due to Curvature of Spacetime

Islam Hassan
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If one day gravitons are discovered, would their action be complementary to the gravitational attraction due to curved spacetime? Can gravity arise from both curved spacetime and exchange of gravitons?

IH
 
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Even if there were a consistent formulation of perturbative quantum gravity in which gravitons would show up, they would only be virtual particles and therefore just an aspect of the formalism at hand. For further discussion, see this thread: https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=506228 .
 
atyy said:
Yes, gravitons and curved spacetime are compatible. A curved spacetime would be (approximately) a coherent state of gravitons on a flat spacetime.

Discussed within string theory on p108 of http://books.google.com/books?id=k4...e+of+strings+background&source=gbs_navlinks_s

If I were you, I wouldn't hand out string theoretic content as if it were standard. Also your answer doesn't make much sense without further detail about the discussion in that book.
 
For a discussion of gravitons without string theory, we can use general relativity as an effective quantum field theory (which is completely standard):
Burgess, http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0311082

Discussions like those on p108 of Polchinski's book are also found at:
David Tong, http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.0333, section 7, p158
Angel Uranga, http://www.ift.uam.es/paginaspersonales/angeluranga/firstpage.html , section 2.1.6, p55
 
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