Tidal effects on radiation in gravitational shockwave collisions
Abstract
We compute high frequency gravitational wave radiation in shockwave collisions of a light mass compact object with energy μL off a heavy compact object (black hole) with energy μH ≫ μL. A formal solution is obtained in terms of shockwave propagators that provide snapshots of O(μLμHn) tidal response functions sensitive to classical and potentially semi-classical dynamics of black hole formation. In a perturbative expansion, the first nontrivial contribution of O(μLμH) is the emission of a graviton from the Lipatov vertex generated by the fusion of two reggeized gravitons. For graviton frequencies ω→ 0, the Lipatov amplitude reduces to the ultrarelativistic limit of the single-graviton exchange Weinberg amplitude. At O(μLμH2), the Lipatov amplitude includes a piece accounting for the rescattering of the graviton off a reggeized graviton and another, corresponding to graviton emission from a vertex fusing three reggeized gravitons. These nontrivial contributions again simplify to the Weinberg radiative amplitude for two-graviton exchange in the soft limit. We highlight throughout double copy structures to gluon radiation in dilute-dense collisions of Yang-Mills shockwaves. We relate our shockwave results to the eikonal multiple scattering framework of Veneziano et al.
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BibTeX
@misc{blackstad2026tidal,
title = {{Tidal effects on radiation in gravitational shockwave collisions}},
author = {Isabelle Blackstad and Himanshu Raj and Raju Venugopalan},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = aug,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2608.27585},
eprint = {2608.27585},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27585},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Tidal effects on radiation in gravitational shockwave collisions
AU - Isabelle Blackstad
AU - Himanshu Raj
AU - Raju Venugopalan
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/08/27
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2608.27585
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27585
AB - We compute high frequency gravitational wave radiation in shockwave collisions of a light mass compact object with energy μ_L off a heavy compact object (black hole) with energy μ_H ≫ μ_L. A formal solution is obtained in terms of shockwave propagators that provide snapshots of O(μ_Lμ_H^n) tidal response functions sensitive to classical and potentially semi-classical dynamics of black hole formation. In a perturbative expansion, the first nontrivial contribution of O(μ_Lμ_H) is the emission of a graviton from the Lipatov vertex generated by the fusion of two reggeized gravitons. For graviton frequencies ω→ 0, the Lipatov amplitude reduces to the ultrarelativistic limit of the single-graviton exchange Weinberg amplitude. At O(μ_Lμ_H^2), the Lipatov amplitude includes a piece accounting for the rescattering of the graviton off a reggeized graviton and another, corresponding to graviton emission from a vertex fusing three reggeized gravitons. These nontrivial contributions again simplify to the Weinberg radiative amplitude for two-graviton exchange in the soft limit. We highlight throughout double copy structures to gluon radiation in dilute-dense collisions of Yang-Mills shockwaves. We relate our shockwave results to the eikonal multiple scattering framework of Veneziano et al.
ER -