Two-point Padé approximants for the deflection of light in the Schwarzschild black hole spacetime geometry
Phys. Rev. D 114, 084015 – Published 5 October, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/3y31-xxvk
Abstract
The deflection angle of a light ray passing the Schwarzschild (spherically symmetric vacuum) black hole was calculated by Charles Galton Darwin in 1959 in terms of the elliptic integral of the first kind. This calculation has been repeated many times and has also been given approximately in terms of elementary functions for impact parameters that either are not too small or are close to the critical impact parameter. Here I present Padé two-point approximants of order [2, 2] (quadratic numerators and denominators), relating the critical impact parameter divided by the actual impact parameter to the exponential of the negative of the deflection angle, that fairly accurately cover the full range of impact parameters greater than the critical impact parameter, which is the case for all photon trajectories that remain outside the black hole. I also present a simpler quadratic approximation that works as well in the middle of the range but not so well at the extremes.
