English

Resumming Scattering Amplitudes for Waveforms

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-04-21 v3 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We develop a formalism to compute non-perturbative 5-point scattering amplitudes and apply it to gravitational waveforms in the two-body problem for arbitrary trajectories. Drawing inspiration from Feshbach's projector formalism in nuclear physics, we introduce effective potentials governing graviton emission and relate them to perturbative scattering amplitudes at arbitrary order in the gravitational coupling and mass ratio. Once these potentials are determined, the corresponding non-perturbative amplitudes in the classical limit are obtained by iterative insertions and subsequently translated into gravitational waveforms using the KMOC formalism. As an application, we compute the gravitational waveform emitted by a conservative two-body dynamics moving along a generic, potentially highly bent, trajectory. Our formalism extends effective field theory matching of the gravitational two-body potential to radiative phenomena, enabling the extraction of gravitational-wave source terms directly from perturbative on-shell amplitudes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.08252,
  title  = {Resumming Scattering Amplitudes for Waveforms},
  author = {Katsuki Aoki and Andrea Cristofoli},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.08252},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

47 pages, 4 figures. v2: references added, improved discussion about wavefunction normalisations, added Appendix B on impulse, v3: published version

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:02:11.393Z