Eikonal methods applied to gravitational scattering amplitudes

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.

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