Events

Date: 22 January 2026   Time: 14:00 - 15:00     

Location: Room 610, G.O. Jones Building

The Gravitational Compton Amplitude

The gravitational Compton amplitude describes gravitational waves scattering off a single black hole and is therefore a one-body observable ideal for analyzing quadratic-in-curvature of generic (Kerr) black holes from an effective field theory point of view. Based on upcoming work together with Y. Fabian Bautista, Gustav Jakobsen, and Kays Haddad, in this talk, I will discuss what makes it worth studying and calculating explicitly. I briefly review elements of black hole perturbation theory, which is the UV theory that describes such objects. I will then explain how worldline quantum field theory (WQFT) is an ideally suited tool to calculate the amplitude, focusing on similarities between this and the gravitation two-body problem which has recently been pushed to four loops. Finally, I will illustrate our matching procedure between these two theories, which allows us to calculate the Love numbers of black holes, with a particular focus on the N-matrix (Magnusian).