English

Gravitational Bremsstrahlung from Reverse Unitarity

High Energy Physics - Theory 2021-05-20 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We compute the total radiated momentum carried by gravitational waves during the scattering of two spinless black holes at the lowest order in Newton's constant, O(G3)\mathcal O(G^3), and all orders in velocity. By analytic continuation into the bound state regime, we obtain the O(G3){\cal O}(G^3) energy loss in elliptic orbits. This provides an essential step towards the complete understanding of the third-post-Minkowskian binary dynamics. We employ the formalism of Kosower, Maybee, and O'Connell (KMOC) which relates classical observables to quantum scattering amplitudes and derive the relevant integrands using generalized unitarity. The subsequent phase-space integrations are performed via the reverse unitarity method familiar from collider physics, using differential equations to obtain the exact velocity dependence from near-static boundary conditions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2101.07255,
  title  = {Gravitational Bremsstrahlung from Reverse Unitarity},
  author = {Enrico Herrmann and Julio Parra-Martinez and Michael S. Ruf and Mao Zeng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.07255},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

5 pages + references, 3 figures. v2: published version

R2 v1 2026-06-23T22:17:19.526Z