Classical Amplitudes in Gravitational-Wave Physics

TL;DR

This thesis advances the understanding of gravitational-wave emission amplitudes, correcting previous results, computing new contributions, and exploring higher-order tail effects using field theory and renormalization techniques.

Contribution

It provides the first calculation of conservative contributions from angular momentum failed tails and extends tail analysis to higher orders with renormalization group resummation.

Findings

Corrected anomalous amplitudes with field theory tools.

Computed conservative contributions from angular momentum failed tails.

Resummed logarithmic tail contributions via renormalization group.

Abstract

In this thesis, we study emission amplitudes for the class of nonlinear processes of tails, which are processes of order $G_N^2$, and represent the effect of scattering gravitational radiation off the static background curvature, including not only mass tails but also the "failed" tails due to the angular momentum of the source. As originally shown in our work, some of these amplitudes present anomalies, which are then properly understood and corrected with field theory tools which have straightforward counterpart in traditional methods. We also investigate the relation between emission and self-energy diagrams and, in particular, show that a correction to the anomalous self-energy diagrams is necessary to correctly account for conservative terms that arise from radiative processes. From this, we obtain the correct contribution to the conservative 5PN stemming from the electric quadrupole angular momentum failed tail, correcting previous results in the literature. Besides this, we also compute for the first time the conservative contributions from the angular momentum failed tail, for arbitrary multipole moments. Subsequently, we explore the natural higher-order extension (of order $G_N^3$) of the mass tails, called tails of tails, for generic electric and magnetic multipoles. As we will see, both long- and short-distance divergences are encountered, which are then properly understood and dealt with in terms of standard renormalization techniques. In this case, we are able to resum the logarithmic contributions through the integration of the renormalization group equation. Thus, in this thesis, we have extended the post-Newtonian perturbative expansion in the particularly thorny region of processes involving the mixture of radiative and potential modes.