Gravitational amplitudes in the Regge limit: waveforms, shock waves and unitarity cuts
Abstract
Motivated by recent progress in the high-energy description of gravitational scattering, we develop a systematic Regge-theory framework for amplitudes describing the scattering of two massive particles with graviton emissions, including spin effects. Working in the ultra-relativistic limit at leading logarithmic accuracy, the massive result smoothly reduces to its massless counterpart. We describe both quantum (Regge trajectory and BFKL -channel evolution) and classical (-channel multi- evolution) contributions using both an exponential representation of the S-matrix and a shock-wave formalism in light-cone quantisation. In the latter approach, gravitational Wilson lines evolve in rapidity space under a boost-invariant Hamiltonian, providing a space-time realisation of the high-energy dynamics and making contact with recent effective field theory descriptions in the forward limit. As an application, we compute the leading-logarithmic contribution to the massive spinless amplitude at 5PM-2SF order, recovering the previously determined massless result, and derive the tree-level amplitude and its associated scattering waveform for Kerr black holes in the ultra-relativistic limit.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2601.21687,
title = {Gravitational amplitudes in the Regge limit: waveforms, shock waves and unitarity cuts},
author = {Francesco Alessio and Vittorio Del Duca and Riccardo Gonzo and Emanuele Rosi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.21687},
year = {2026}
}