Gravitational lensing of massive particles in Schwarzschild gravity

Abstract

Both massless light ray and objects with nonzero mass experience trajectory bending in a gravitational field. In this work the bending of trajectories of massive objects in a Schwarzschild spacetime and the corresponding gravitational lensing (GL) effects are studied. A particle sphere for Schwarzschild black hole (BH) is found with its radius a simple function of the particle velocity and proportional to the BH mass. A single master formula for both the massless and massive particle bending angle is found, in the form of an elliptic function depending only on the velocity and impact parameter. This bending angle is expanded in both large and small velocity limits and large and small impact parameter limits. The corresponding deflection angle for weak and strong GL of massive particles are analyzed, and their corrections to the light ray deflection angles are obtained. The dependence of the deflection angles on the source angle and the particle speed is investigated. Finally we discuss the potential applications of the results in hypervelocity star observations and in determining mass/mass hierarchy of slow particles/objects.