CERN Accelerating science

Article
Report number	arXiv:2306.16488 ; CERN-TH-2023-108 ; NORDITA 2023-026 ; QMUL-PH-23-09 ; UUITP-14/23
Title	The gravitational eikonal: from particle, string and brane collisions to black-hole encounters
Author(s)	Di Vecchia, Paolo (Bohr Inst. ; Nordita ; Royal Inst. Tech., Stockholm) ; Heissenberg, Carlo (Nordita ; Royal Inst. Tech., Stockholm ; Uppsala U.) ; Russo, Rodolfo (Queen Mary, U. of London) ; Veneziano, Gabriele (CERN ; College de France)
Publication	2024-07-01
Imprint	2023-06-28
Number of pages	215
Note	215 pages, 19 figures. v2: published version
In:	Phys. Rep. 1083 (2024) 1-169
DOI	10.1016/j.physrep.2024.06.002 (publication)
Subject category	hep-ph ; Particle Physics - Phenomenology ; gr-qc ; General Relativity and Cosmology ; hep-th ; Particle Physics - Theory
Abstract	Motivated by conceptual problems in quantum theories of gravity, the gravitational eikonal approach, inspired by its electromagnetic predecessor, has been successfully applied to the transplanckian energy collisions of elementary particles and strings since the late eighties, and to string-brane collisions in the past decade. After the direct detection of gravitational waves from black-hole mergers, most of the attention has shifted towards adapting these methods to the physics of black-hole encounters. For such systems, the eikonal exponentiation provides an amplitude-based approach to calculate classical gravitational observables, thus complementing more traditional analytic methods such as the Post-Newtonian expansion, the worldline formalism, or the Effective-One-Body approach. In this review we summarize the main ideas and techniques behind the gravitational eikonal formalism. We discuss how it can be applied in various different physical setups involving particles, strings and branes and then we mainly concentrate on the most recent developments, focusing on massive scalars minimally coupled to gravity, for which we aim at being as self-contained and comprehensive as possible.
Copyright/License	preprint: (License: arXiv nonexclusive-distrib 1.0) publication: © 2024 The Author(s) (License: CC BY 4.0)

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