Tidal effects in quantum field theory

• Main Authors: Kays Haddad, Andreas Helset
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SpringerOpen 2020-12-01
• Series: Journal of High Energy Physics
• Subjects: Effective Field Theories; Scattering Amplitudes; Black Holes
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP12(2020)024

Abstract We apply the Hilbert series to extend the gravitational action for a scalar field to a complete, non-redundant basis of higher-dimensional operators that is quadratic in the scalars and the Weyl tensor. Such an extension of the action fully describes tidal effects arising from operators involving two powers of the curvature. As an application of this new action, we compute all spinless tidal effects at the leading post-Minkowskian order. This computation is greatly simplified by appealing to the heavy limit, where only a severely constrained set of operators can contribute classically at the one-loop level. Finally, we use this amplitude to derive the O G 2 $$ \mathcal{O}\left({G}^2\right) $$ tidal corrections to the Hamiltonian and the scattering angle.