1:30 pm MCP 201
Understanding Gravitational Tides with Scattering Amplitudes.
Recent progress in gravitational wave astronomy has spurred the development of precision theoretical tools to describe gravitational binary dynamics. One such tool is classical worldline effective field theory (EFT), which builds a perturbative expansion of the gravitational field from binary components around the point particle limit. The Wilson coefficients of this EFT capture tidal deformations of compact objects and provide a generalization to the tidal Love numbers of Newtonian gravity. In the first part of my talk, I will show how these coefficients can be determined from scattering amplitudes of the gravitational Raman process, a quasi-elastic scattering of waves off compact objects. In the second part of my talk, I will use the Raman scattering amplitudes to derive a non-perturbative expression for the universal anomalous scaling of the multipole moments of a generic gravitating source. The resulting anomalous dimension is the same for any object, including black holes, neutron stars, and binary systems. I will use this expression for a resummation of short-distance logarithms (tails) in the gravitational waveform of binary systems, which may improve the modeling of signals from current and future gravitational wave experiments. Finally, I will discuss practical applications of worldline EFT to the searches of exotic compact objects in the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA gravitational wave data.
Event Type
May
14