English

A Runway to Dissipation of Angular Momentum via Worldline Quantum Field Theory

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-05-13 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We extend the worldline quantum field theory formalism to include a direct diagrammatic method of computing the total flux of angular momentum from a black hole scattering event in the post-Minkowskian regime. Remarkably, except for subtle zero-frequency gravitons, the diagrammatic and integrational challenge is in a one-to-one correspondence with the analogous calculation of the black hole impulses -- and the well-developed WQFT methodologies for the impulse may thus be directly imported to this problem. Zero-frequency gravitons appear in this calculation as a "static" integration region in addition to the "dynamical" region usually encountered for the impulse. We show that a large class of static contributions can be organized systematically by introducing nn-point functions referred to as "static correlators". They reduce to a simple one-loop integral family which we compute explicitly using integration-by-parts relations and the method of differential equations. In passing, our analysis shows that static contributions disappear in space-time dimensions D>4D>4. As a concrete application of our new method, we compute explicitly the O(G3)\mathcal{O}(G^3) total flux of angular momentum reproducing known results. Further, we apply the same method to electromagnetism where we compute the analogous O(α3)\mathcal{O}(\alpha^3) result.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.12214,
  title  = {A Runway to Dissipation of Angular Momentum via Worldline Quantum Field Theory},
  author = {Gustav Uhre Jakobsen and Kathrin Stoldt},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.12214},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

17 pages, 3 figures