Quadratic gravity potentials in de Sitter spacetime from Feynman diagrams

Abstract

We employ a manifestly covariant formalism to compute the tree-level amputated Green’s function of non-minimally coupled scalar fields in quadratic gravity in a de Sitter background. We study this Green’s function in the adiabatic limit, and construct the classical Newtonian potential. At short distances, the flat-spacetime Yukawa potential is reproduced, while the curvature gives rise to corrections to the potential at large distances. Beyond the Hubble radius, the potential vanishes identically, in agreement with the causal structure of de Sitter spacetime. For sub-Hubble distances, we investigate whether the modifications to the potential reproduce Modified Newtonian Dynamics.