Bending of light in conformal Weyl gravity

Abstract

We reexamine the bending of light issue associated with the metric of the static, spherically symmetric solution of Weyl gravity discovered by Mannheim and Kazanas (1989). To this end we employ the procedure used recently by Rindler and Ishak to obtain the bending angle of light by a centrally concentrated spherically symmetric matter distribution in a Schwarzschild--de Sitter background. In earlier studies the term $\ensuremath{\gamma}r$ in the metric led to the paradoxical result of a bending angle proportional to the photon impact parameter, when using the usual formalism appropriate to asymptotically flat space-times. However, employing the approach of light bending of Rindler and Ishak we show that the effects of this term are in fact insignificant, with the discrepancy between the two procedures attributed to the definition of the bending angle between the asymptotically flat and nonflat spaces.