On-Shell Approach to Black Hole Mergers

TL;DR

This paper introduces an on-shell amplitude framework for modeling black hole mergers, deriving classical waveforms and conservation laws, and connecting with perturbation theory and soft graviton theorems.

Contribution

It proposes a novel on-shell amplitude approach to black hole mergers, providing a unified method to compute waveforms and analyze conservation laws.

Findings

Derived a three-point amplitude for black hole mergers.

Reproduced classical conservation laws using the KMOC formalism.

Matched the soft graviton theorem to all orders in spin.

Abstract

We develop an on-shell approach to study black hole mergers. Since, asymptotically, the initial and final states can be described by point-like spinning particles, we propose a massive three-point amplitude for the merger of two Schwarzschild black holes into a Kerr black hole. This three-point amplitude and the spectral function of the final state are fully determined by kinematics and the model-independent input about the black hole merger which is described by a complete absorption process. Using the Kosower-Maybee-O'Connell (KMOC) formalism, we then reproduce the classical conservation laws for momentum and angular momentum after the merger. As an application, we use the proposed three-point to compute the graviton emission amplitude, from which we extract the merger waveform to all orders in spin but leading in gravitational coupling. Up to sub-subleading order in spin, this matches the classical soft graviton theorem. We conclude with a comparison to black hole perturbation theory, which gives complementary amplitudes which are non-perturbative in the gravitational coupling but to leading order in the extreme mass ratio limit. This also highlights how boundary conditions on a Schwarzschild background can be used to rederive the proposed on-shell amplitudes for merger processes.