English

Gravitational amplitudes in the Regge limit: waveforms, shock waves and unitarity cuts

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-01-30 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

Motivated by recent progress in the high-energy description of gravitational scattering, we develop a systematic Regge-theory framework for 22+n2\to2+n amplitudes describing the scattering of two massive particles with nn 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 tt-channel evolution) and classical (ss-channel multi-HH 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 222\to2 amplitude at 5PM-2SF order, recovering the previously determined massless result, and derive the tree-level 232\to3 amplitude and its associated scattering waveform for Kerr black holes in the ultra-relativistic limit.

Keywords

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}
}