Gravitational Waves from High-Energy Collisions. From thought experiment to precision science

by Dr Carlo Heissenberg

Thursday Jul 16, 2026, 3:00 PM → 4:15 PM Europe/Rome

Dipartimento/1-1 - Sala Consiglio (Dipartimento)

The detection of gravitational waves emitted by binary systems has brought about a new era of precision measurements, putting the two-body problem in General Relativity in the spotlight. This has stimulated ground-breaking advancements on the theory side, one of which is due to an unexpected twist: the realization that scattering amplitudes, the bread-and-butter of particle-physics calculations, provide remarkably efficient tools to make predictions for gravitational waves. This idea had already surfaced in the 80s and 90s, in the study of high-energy scattering of elementary particles and strings. When the energy is sufficiently large, the amplitude describing the process is dominated by the semi-classical eikonal phase, which greatly simplifies the analysis and directly connects to physical observables. What had been overlooked at the time is the fact that the “particles” need not be elementary, and the same idea can be successfully applied to binary systems of black holes or neutron stars, the typical gravitational-wave sources, whose large mass enables the same semi-classical approximation. Thanks to this link, many new results on compact binary systems have been obtained in recent years by answering General Relativity questions with collider-physics techniques. In this colloquium I will present an overview of such recent achievements, illustrate how amplitudes and the eikonal phase connect to concrete gravitational-wave observables, and outline the challenges that lie ahead.

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