Gravitational Radiation from Shockwave Scattering in the Self-Force EFT

Abstract

We investigate the high-energy collision of two spinless bodies within the Self-Force Effective Field Theory (EFT), taking one of them to be massless and highly energetic, such that it generates a gravitational shockwave (GSW) background. The GSW is perturbed by the second body, either massless or massive, satisfying respectively $E_2/E_1\ll1$ or $m_2/E_1\ll1$. Although the Self-Force expansion for shockwaves is frame-dependent, we freely choose a frame in which this EFT manifests its power, obtaining results valid to all orders in Newton's constant that make the underlying resummation patterns evident. Specifically, we push the expansion to 1SF order and prove the all-order vanishing of the so-called recoil operators in light-cone gauge. We obtain the exact graviton propagator on the shockwave background, matching previous results, and use it to compute the on-shell waveform at 1SF order in momentum space, specialising to the massless-massless collision. The waveform is computed to all orders in the Post-Minkowskian, or weak-field, expansion. In the trans-Planckian regime, its resummed form is proved to yield a UV-finite angular spectrum of radiated energy.