Found 2 result(s)

01.05.2024 (Wednesday)

Classical observables of General Relativity from scattering amplitudes

Regular Seminar Paolo di Vecchia (Stockholm U. and Nordita)

at:
14:00 KCL
room S0.12
abstract:

I will be using scattering amplitudes, instead of the Lagrangian of General Relativity (GR), to compute classical observables in GR. In the first part of the seminar I will consider the elastic scattering of two massive particles, describing two black holes, and I will show how to compute the eikonal up to two-loop order, corresponding to third Post-Minkowskian (3PM) order, that contains all the classical information. From it I will compute the first observable that is the classical deflection angle. In the second part of the seminar I will consider inelastic processes with the emission of soft gravitons. In this case the eikonal becomes an operator containing the creation and annihilation operators of the gravitons. The case of soft gravitons can be treated following the Bloch-Nordsieck approach and, in this case, I will be computing two other observables: the zero-frequency limit (ZFL) of the spectrum dE/d\omega of the emitted radiation and the angular momentum loss at 2PM and 3PM. I will consider also the case in which there are static modes localised at $\omega=0$. In the third part of the seminar I will be discussing soft theorems with one graviton emission, first briefly at tree level, and then at loop level following the paper by Weinberg from 1965. Assuming the eikonal resummation and that all infrared divergences in the case of gravity come only from one loop diagrams, I will compute the universal soft terms, corresponding to $\frac{1}{\omega}$, $\log \omega$ and $\omega \log^2 \omega$, first at the tree and one-loop level and then for the last two observables also at two-loop level. I will then use them to compute their contribution to the spectrum of emitted energy. Finally, if I have time left, I I will study the high energy limit. In particular, since the graviton is the massless particle with the highest spin, we expect universality at high energy. I will show that universality at high energy is satisfied both in the elastic and inelastic case, but this happens in the inelastic case in a very non trivial way. I will end with some conclusions and with a list of open problems.

05.05.2017 (Friday)

The tale of two dilatons

Exceptional Seminar Paolo Di Vecchia (NBI/Nordita)

at:
12:00 QMW
room GO Jones LG7
abstract:

In this talk we will discuss how gauge invariance fixes the soft behavior of massless particles as photons, gluons, gravitons, dilatons and Kalb-Ramond field. We will then check these results in string theory and we will show that the subsubleading behavior for gravitons includes string corrections in the bosonic and heterotic strings, but not in superstring. They are consequence of the fact that the three-graviton amplitude has string corrections with respect to the field theoretical one. It turns out, instead, that the soft behavior of the dilaton has no string corrections and, in particular, involves the generators of dilatations and special conformal transformations. We then study the soft behavior of the Goldstone boson, called in the literature also dilaton, that one gets when one breaks spontaneously the conformal symmetry and we show that its soft behavior is very similar, but not identical, to that of the string dilaton.