The 2nd Annual Workshop on Self-Force and Amplitudes will be hosted by the Gravitational Waves Group at the University of Southampton from 9th - 12th September 2025.
Recent developments in perturbative quantum field theory have offered new insights into the classical two-body dynamics in the post-Minkowskian expansion (i.e., expansion in Newton's constant), leveraging efficient computational techniques traditionally used for collider physics. At the same time, the gravitational self-force expansion has allowed the gravitational-wave community to develop a description of the two-body dynamics which is fully non-perturbative in the coupling, while being accurate only in the limit of small mass ratios.
There are exciting prospects in uniting these two complementary approaches, possibly yielding powerful new modeling methods for gravitational-wave astronomy and new insights into the connections between gravity and quantum field theory. There have recently been notable steps toward this goal, but much more remains to be done to fully benefit from synergies between the two methods. This workshop is a sequel to the event held at the Higgs Centre in Edinburgh in 2024, which brought together experts from both communities to establish new collaborations. Topics will include
- using data from scattering scenarios to inform models of gravitationally bound systems
- using the self-force expansion to determine unknown high-order terms in the post-Minkowskian series, and vice versa
- using self-force results to inform resummations of post-Minkowskian calculations, and vice versa
- validating and informing resummation techniques using numerical relativity simulations of scattering orbits
- describing Kerr black holes with amplitudes and point particles
- investigating double copy structures in classical gravity and black hole perturbation theory
Funding Sources
This workshop is funded by the UKRI/ERC grant GWModels and the ERC grant GraWFTy.
