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On Perturbatively Dressed Observables

  • Clifford Cheung
  • Allic Sivaramakrishnan
  • Jordan Wilson-Gerow
  • Lihang Zhou
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Abstract

A central lesson of gravity is that local observables are ill-defined. Coordinates themselves are a redundancy of description, so any particular point in spacetime is only meaningful once defined relationally by clocks, rulers, or asymptotic data. Despite extensive formal work on this subject, explicit calculations of the resulting gravitationally-dressed observables are more scarce. In this paper we perturbatively compute dressed matrix elements of local operators in electrodynamics and general relativity, including both potential and radiative photons and gravitons. Our expressions indicate that dressing is not ornamental: it universally induces kinematic singularities that can substantively reshape observables. We further show how dressing is mathematically equivalent to gauge fixing, as demonstrated by a dynamical temporal gauge in which the gauge-fixing vector is itself a geodesic fluid.

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Cite

BibTeXRIS
BibTeX
@misc{cheung2026perturbatively,
  title = {{On Perturbatively Dressed Observables}},
  author = {Clifford Cheung and Allic Sivaramakrishnan and Jordan Wilson-Gerow and Lihang Zhou},
  howpublished = {arXiv},
  year = {2026},
  month = may,
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2605.26077},
  eprint = {2605.26077},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26077},
}
RIS
TY  - UNPB
TI  - On Perturbatively Dressed Observables
AU  - Clifford Cheung
AU  - Allic Sivaramakrishnan
AU  - Jordan Wilson-Gerow
AU  - Lihang Zhou
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/25
PB  - arXiv
DO  - 10.48550/arxiv.2605.26077
UR  - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26077
AB  - A central lesson of gravity is that local observables are ill-defined. Coordinates themselves are a redundancy of description, so any particular point in spacetime is only meaningful once defined relationally by clocks, rulers, or asymptotic data. Despite extensive formal work on this subject, explicit calculations of the resulting gravitationally-dressed observables are more scarce. In this paper we perturbatively compute dressed matrix elements of local operators in electrodynamics and general relativity, including both potential and radiative photons and gravitons. Our expressions indicate that dressing is not ornamental: it universally induces kinematic singularities that can substantively reshape observables. We further show how dressing is mathematically equivalent to gauge fixing, as demonstrated by a dynamical temporal gauge in which the gauge-fixing vector is itself a geodesic fluid.
ER  -