English

Frequency-domain approach to self-force in hyperbolic scattering

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2023-09-14 v2 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We develop a frequency-domain method for calculating the self-force acting on a scalar charge on a fixed scattering geodesic in Schwarzschild spacetime. Existing frequency-domain methods, which are tailored for bound orbits, are inadequate here for several reasons. One must account for the continuous spectrum in the scattering problem, deal with slowly-convergent radial integrals that are hard to evaluate numerically, and confront the inapplicability of the standard self-force method of "extended homogeneous solutions", which only works for compactly supported sources. We tackle each of these issues in turn, and then present a full numerical implementation, in which we calculate the self-force correction to the scatter angle due to scalar-field back-reaction. We perform a range of internal validation tests, as well as ones based on comparison with existing time-domain results. We discuss the merits and remaining limitations of our method, and outline directions for future work.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.09724,
  title  = {Frequency-domain approach to self-force in hyperbolic scattering},
  author = {Christopher Whittall and Leor Barack},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.09724},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

30 pages, 11 figures; matched to published version and corrected inconsequential typos in Eqs. (12)-(15) and below Eq. (120)

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:36:20.149Z