Gravitational Bremsstrahlung in Black-Hole Scattering at $\mathcal{O}(G^3)$: Quadratic-in-Spin Effects

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method using supersymmetric worldline quantum field theory to compute gravitational waveforms from spinning black hole scattering at next-to-leading order, including quadratic-in-spin effects, and validates the results against scattering amplitudes.

Contribution

It presents the first computation of the gravitational waveform at order G^3 with quadratic-in-spin effects using a supersymmetric WQFT approach, and derives the leading-order waveform for three-body scattering of spinning black holes.

Findings

First waveform at order G^3 with quadratic-in-spin effects.

First three-body scattering waveform for spinning black holes.

Validation against scattering amplitude results.

Abstract

We are employing a supersymmetric variant of the worldline quantum field theory (WQFT) formalism to compute the far-field momentum-space gravitational waveform emitted during the scattering of two spinning black holes at next-to-leading order (NLO) in the post-Minkowskian expansion. Our results are accurate up to quadratic-in-spin contributions, which means we report for the very first time the waveform observable at the order $\mathcal{O}(G^3\mathcal{S}^2)$. Our computation is based on mapping $n$-body tree-level amplitudes in such a way that we can obtain the $(n-2)$-loop two-body waveform integrand. We discuss in detail this procedure and highlight the similarity of the resulting structures with those obtained in the scattering-amplitude approach. As a by product of our computational approach, we also obtain, for the first time, the leading-order waveform for three-body scattering of spinning black holes. We validated our results in various ways but most notably, we find exact agreement for the NLO waveform integrand obtained from the WQFT and the classical limit of scattering amplitudes in QFT.