Black Hole Binary Dynamics from Scattering Amplitudes

Tuesday, 3 December 2019 at 11:15, in Y16 G05 - Campus Irchel

We use modern QFT methods to compute the conservative dynamics of black hole binary systems in the context of LIGO / VIRGO experiments, at the 3rd-post-Minkowskian order which is beyond the state of the art in classical GR calculations so far. The two-loop integrand is constructed from the double-copy construction and generalized unitarity, while non-relativistic EFT is used to perform asymptotic expansion and extract the classical potential. We also present ongoing work to apply the method of canonical differential equations to streamline the calculation at two loops and beyond. The determination of boundary conditions is simplified by knowing physical properties of the classical potential.