Gravity as the Spin-2 Quantum Gauge Theory

This work deals with the theory of a quantized spin-2 field in the framework of causal perturbation theory. It is divided into two parts. In the first part we analyze the gauge structure of a massless self-interacting quantum tensor field. We look at this theory from a pure field theoretical point of view without assuming any geometrical aspect from general relativity. To first order in the perturbation expansion of the $S$-matrix we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for such a theory to be gauge invariant, by which we mean that the gauge variation of the self-coupling with respect to the gauge charge operator $Q$ is a divergence in the sense of vector analysis. The most general trilinear self-coupling of the graviton field turns out to be the one derived from the Einstein-Hilbert action plus coboundaries and divergences. In the second part of this work (sect.9) we consider a massive scalar field coupled to gravity. We are interested in the long range behaviour of this theory. Radiative corrections for two particle scattering are investigated in the adiabatic limit, where the cutoff of the interaction at infinity is removed. We compute the differential cross section for graviton bremsstrahlung in which one of the scattered particles emits a graviton of low energy. It is shown that such processes are logarithmically divergent in the adiabatic limit. Furthermore we show that the differential cross section for two particle scattering with a graviton self-energy insertion is finite in the adiabatic limit while for matter self-energy it is logarithmically divergent, too.