Field quantizations in Schwarzschild spacetime: Theory versus low-energy experiments

Nonrelativistic quantum particles in Earth’s gravitational field are successfully described by the Schrödinger equation with Newton’s gravitational potential. Particularly, quantum mechanics is in agreement with such experiments as free fall and quantum interference induced by gravity. However, quantum mechanics is a low-energy approximation to quantum field theory. The latter is successful by the description of high-energy experiments. Gravity is embedded in quantum field theory through the general-covariance principle. This framework is known in the literature as quantum field theory in curved spacetime, where the concept of a quantum particle is, though, ambiguous. In this article, we study in this framework how a Hawking particle moves in the far-horizon region of Schwarzschild spacetime by computing its propagator. We find this propagator differs from that which follows from the path-integral formalism—the formalism which adequately describes both free fall and quantum interference induced by gravity.