An Eikonal Approach to Gravitational Scattering and Waveforms
Date: 12 DECEMBER 2024 from 15:00 to 16:00
Event location: Sala IR-1A
In this talk, I will discuss recent developments in the calculation of the gravitational waveform sourced by a scattering of two compact objects, considering two complementary regimes. The first is the post-Minkowskian (PM) approximation, where one focuses on widely separated objects, i.e. scatterings at large impact parameters. In this setup, interactions are weak and can be treated perturbatively. A natural approach to attack this problem is offered by the connection with scattering amplitudes, whose eikonal exponentiation captures the classical limit. I will discuss in particular how the next-to-leading PM waveform can be extracted from a one-loop $2\to3$ amplitude. The second approximation consists in focusing on low-frequency emissions, which are governed by universal soft theorems. These are simple relations that dictate the structure of log-enhanced terms of the type $\omega^{n-1}(\log\omega)^n$ for $n=0,1,2...$ in the low-frequency expansion, as $\omega\to0$. I will present a recent proposal for a resummation of all such terms and discuss their contribution to the energy emission spectrum.