Graviton

If it exists, the graviton is expected to be massless because the gravitational force has a very long range, and appears to propagate at the speed of light. The graviton must be a spin-2 boson because the source of gravitation is the stress–energy tensor, a second-order tensor (compared with electromagnetism's spin-1 photon, the source of which is the four-current, a first-order tensor). Additionally, it can be shown that any massless spin-2 field would give rise to a force indistinguishable from gravitation, because a massless spin-2 field would couple to the stress–energy tensor in the same way that gravitational interactions do. This result suggests that, if a massless spin-2 particle is discovered, it must be the graviton.[5]

It is hypothesized that gravitational interactions are mediated by an as yet undiscovered elementary particle, dubbed the graviton. The three other known forces of nature are mediated by elementary particles: electromagnetism by the photon, the strong interaction by gluons, and the weak interaction by the W and Z bosons. All three of these forces appear to be accurately described by the Standard Model of particle physics. In the classical limit, a successful theory of gravitons would reduce to general relativity, which itself reduces to Newton's law of gravitation in the weak-field limit.[6][7][8]

The term graviton was originally coined in 1934 by Soviet physicists Dmitrii Blokhintsev and F.M. Gal'perin.[3] A mediation of the gravitational interaction by particles was anticipated by Pierre-Simon Laplace.[9] Just like Newton's anticipation of photons, Laplace's anticipated "gravitons" had a greater speed than c, the speed of gravitons expected in modern theories, and were evidently not connected to quantum mechanics.

String theory predicts the existence of gravitons and their well-defined interactions. A graviton in perturbative string theory is a closed string in a very particular low-energy vibrational state. The scattering of gravitons in string theory can also be computed from the correlation functions in conformal field theory, as dictated by the AdS/CFT correspondence, or from matrix theory.[citation needed]

A feature of gravitons in string theory is that, as closed strings without endpoints, they would not be bound to branes and could move freely between them. If we live on a brane (as hypothesized by brane theories), this "leakage" of gravitons from the brane into higher-dimensional space could explain why gravitation is such a weak force, and gravitons from other branes adjacent to our own could provide a potential explanation for dark matter. However, if gravitons were to move completely freely between branes, this would dilute gravity too much, causing a violation of Newton's inverse-square law. To combat this, Lisa Randall found that a three-brane (such as ours) would have a gravitational pull of its own, preventing gravitons from drifting freely, possibly resulting in the diluted gravity we observe, while roughly maintaining Newton's inverse square law.[14] See brane cosmology.

A theory by Ahmed Farag Ali and Saurya Das adds quantum mechanical corrections (using Bohm trajectories) to general relativistic geodesics. If gravitons are given a small but non-zero mass, it could explain the cosmological constant without need for dark energy and solve the smallness problem.[15] The theory received an Honorable Mention in the 2014 Essay Competition of the Gravity Research Foundation for explaining the smallness of cosmological constant.[16] Also the theory received an Honorable Mention in the 2015 Essay Competition of the Gravity Research Foundation for naturally explaining the observed large-scale homogeneity and isotropy of the universe due to the proposed quantum corrections.[17]