Gauge Dependence of the Effective Gravitational Field

We analyze the gauge ambiguity problem for the effective gravitational field from the standpoint of the measurement process. The motion of a test point particle playing the role of a measuring device is investigated in the field of a point gravitating mass in the one-loop approximation. We show that the gravitational field value determined from the effective equations of motion of the device explicitly depends on the Feynman gauge parameter. This dependence is essential in the sense that a gauge variation cannot be interpreted as a deformation of the reference frame, which leads to a gauge ambiguity in the values of observed quantities. In particular, this result disproves the hypothesis that gauge dependence is canceled in the effective equations of motion of a classical point particle.