Deflection of light to second order in conformal Weyl gravity

We reexamine the deflection of light in conformal Weyl gravity obtained in Sultana and Kazanas (2010), by extending the calculation based on the procedure by Rindler and Ishak, for the bending angle by a centrally concentrated spherically symmetric matter distribution, to second order in M/R, where M is the mass of the source and R is the impact parameter. It has recently been reported in Bhattacharya et al. (JCAP 09 (2010) 004; JCAP 02 (2011) 028), that when this calculation is done to second order, the term gamma r in the Mannheim-Kazanas metric, yields again the paradoxical contribution gamma R (where the bending angle is proportional to the impact parameter) obtained by standard formalisms appropriate to asymptotically flat spacetimes. We show that no such contribution is obtained for a second order calculation and the effects of the term gamma r in the metric are again insignificant as reported in our earlier work.