Angular Momentum Loss Due to Tidal Effects in the Post-Minkowskian Expansion

Abstract

We calculate the tidal corrections to the loss of angular momentum in a two-body collision at leading Post-Minkowskian order from an amplitude-based approach. The eikonal operator allows us to efficiently combine elastic and inelastic amplitudes, and captures both the contributions due to genuine gravitational-wave emissions and those due to the static gravitational field. We calculate the former by harnessing powerful collider-physics techniques such as reverse-unitarity, thereby reducing them to cut two-loop integrals, and validate the result with an independent calculation in the Post-Newtonian limit. For the latter, we can employ the results of arXiv:2203.11915 where static-field effects were calculated for generic gravitational scattering events using the leading soft graviton theorem.

Comments: 6 pages + references, published in Physical Review Letters