Amplitudes for black holes

Abstract

In recent years the double copy has provided a bridge between scattering amplitudes and gravitational interactions, allowing physicists to perform computations once unthinkable. Its strength relies on borrowing perturbative (much easier) results from gauge theories, and extracting classical results from quantum amplitudes. Recently, the gravitational two-body problem, central for the blooming field of gravitational wave physics, is being scrutinized under the light of such duality. In this thesis we work towards understanding how the double copy can help us compute classical gravity observables through the socalled “KMOC formalism”. This is a framework that has already received great interest from both the gravitational waves and the amplitude community, since it focuses directly on the computation of physical observables (for instance, without resorting to a Hamiltonian) allowing for a deeper understanding of underlying structures present in the classical limit of amplitudes.