English

Classical Soft Graviton Theorem Rewritten

High Energy Physics - Theory 2022-02-02 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

Classical soft graviton theorem gives the gravitational wave-form at future null infinity at late retarded time uu for a general classical scattering. The large uu expansion has three known universal terms: the constant term, the term proportional to 1/u1/u and the term proportional to lnu/u2\ln u/u^2, whose coefficients are determined solely in terms of the momenta of incoming and the outgoing hard particles, including the momenta carried by outgoing gravitational and electromagnetic radiation produced during scattering. For the constant term, also known as the memory effect, the dependence on the momenta carried away by the final state radiation / massless particles is known as non-linear memory or null memory. It was shown earlier that for the coefficient of the 1/u1/u term the dependence on the momenta of the final state massless particles / radiation cancels and the result can be written solely in terms of the momenta of the incoming particles / radiation and the final state massive particles. In this note we show that the same result holds for the coefficient of the lnu/u2\ln u/u^2 term. Our result implies that for scattering of massless particles the coefficients of the 1/u1/u and lnu/u2\ln u/u^2 terms are determined solely by the incoming momenta, even if the particles coalesce to form a black hole and massless radiation. We use our result to compute the low frequency flux of gravitational radiation from the collision of massless particles at large impact parameter.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2105.08739,
  title  = {Classical Soft Graviton Theorem Rewritten},
  author = {Biswajit Sahoo and Ashoke Sen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.08739},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

LaTeX file, 21 pages; v2: added a section containing computation of flux of soft radiation during scattering of massless particles

R2 v1 2026-06-24T02:14:14.766Z