English

Eikonal methods applied to gravitational scattering amplitudes

High Energy Physics - Theory 2015-05-20 v3 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We apply factorization and eikonal methods from gauge theories to scattering amplitudes in gravity. We hypothesize that these amplitudes factor into an IR-divergent soft function and an IR-finite hard function, with the former given by the expectation value of a product of gravitational Wilson line operators. Using this approach, we show that the IR-divergent part of the n-graviton scattering amplitude is given by the exponential of the one-loop IR divergence, as originally discovered by Weinberg, with no additional subleading IR-divergent contributions in dimensional regularization.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1101.1524,
  title  = {Eikonal methods applied to gravitational scattering amplitudes},
  author = {Stephen G. Naculich and Howard J. Schnitzer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1101.1524},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

16 pages, 3 figures; v2: title change and minor rewording (published version); v3: typos corrected in eqs.(3.2),(4.1)

R2 v1 2026-06-21T17:09:04.560Z