Photon-Gravity Coupling in Schwarzschild Spacetime

A canonical formalism for quantum electrodynamics in curved spacetime is developed. This formalism enables a systematic investigation of photons in the Schwarzschild gravitational field, yielding novel results as well as refining previous results that were predicted by heuristic methods. The claim that "the gravitational redshift is a shift in the sharp frequencies of the photons for all frequencies of the spectrum" is proved. It is shown the gravitational superposition decoherence is due to photon-gravity coupling and observer-dependent quantum electrodynamics in curved spacetime phenomena. The full quantum-general relativistic nature of the photon gravitational interferometric relative phase shift is demonstrated, and it is shown its observation will falsify the validity of Newtonian gravity and the extension of the Einstein equivalence principle beyond a single event (even in the weak uniform gravitational field.)