A tale of tails through generalized unitarity

Authors: Alex Edison, Michèle Levi

Preprint Number: UUITP-05/22

We introduce a novel framework to study high-order gravitational effects on a binary from the scattering of its emitted gravitational radiation. Here we focus on the radiation-reaction due to the background of the binary’s gravitational potential, namely on the so-called tail effects. We start from the effective field theory of a binary composite particle, and through multi-loop and generalized unitarity methods, we derive the effective action of the dynamical multipoles, the energy spectrum, and the observable flux due to these effects. We proceed through the third subleading such radiation-reaction effect – at the four-loop level and the seventh order in post-Newtonian gravity – shedding new light on the higher-order effects, and completing the state of the art.