Abstract
Collinear and soft divergences in perturbative quantum gravity are investigated to arbitrary orders in amplitudes for wide-angle scattering, using methods developed for gauge theories. We show that collinear singularities cancel when all such divergent diagrams are summed over, by using the gravitational Ward identity that decouples unphysical polarizations from the S-matrix. This analysis generalizes a result previously demonstrated in the eikonal approximation. We also confirm that the only virtual graviton corrections that give soft logarithmic divergences are of the ladder and crossed ladder types.
5 More- Received 8 September 2011
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.84.104040
© 2011 American Physical Society
Synopsis
Wrestling with Infinities
Published 23 November 2011
Theorists show that mathematical divergences may not be a problem for the low-energy limit of certain effective theories of quantum gravity.
See more in Physics