Claudia de Rham, Jérémie Francfort, Jun Zhang

We investigate the propagation of gravitational waves on a black hole background within the low energy effective field theory of gravity, where effects from heavy fields are captured by higher dimensional curvature operators. Depending on the spin of the particles integrated out, the speed of gravitational waves at low energy can be either superluminal or subluminal as compared to the causal structure observed by other species. Interestingly however, gravitational waves are always exactly luminal at the black hole horizon, implying that the horizon is identically defined for all species. We further compute the corrections on quasinormal frequencies caused by the higher dimensional curvature operators and highlight the corrections arising from the low energy effective field.

Clifford Cheung, James Mangan, Chia-Hsien Shen

We argue that conformal invariance is a common thread linking scalar effective field theories appearing in the double copy. For a derivatively coupled scalar with a quartic ${\cal O}(p^4)$ vertex, classical conformal invariance dictates an infinite tower of additional interactions that coincide exactly with Dirac-Born-Infeld theory analytically continued to spacetime dimension $D=0$. For the case of a quartic ${\cal O}(p^6)$ vertex, classical conformal invariance constrains the theory to be the special Galileon in $D=-2$ dimensions. We also verify the conformal invariance of these theories by showing that their amplitudes are uniquely fixed by the conformal Ward identities. In these theories conformal invariance is a much more stringent constraint than scale invariance.

Elizabeth Himwich, Sruthi A. Narayanan, Monica Pate, Nisarga Paul, Andrew Strominger

The gravitational $\mathcal{S}$-matrix defined with an infrared (IR) cutoff factorizes into hard and soft factors. The soft factor is universal and contains all the IR and collinear divergences. Here we show, in a momentum space basis, that the intricate expression for the soft factor is fully reproduced by two boundary currents, which live on the celestial sphere. The first of these is the supertranslation current, which generates spacetime supertranslations. The second is its symplectic partner, the Goldstone current for spontaneously broken supertranslations. The current algebra has an off-diagonal level structure involving the gravitational cusp anomalous dimension and the logarithm of the IR cutoff. It is further shown that the gravitational memory effect is contained as an IR safe observable within the soft $\mathcal{S}$-matrix.

Minyuan Jiang, Teng Ma, Jing Shu

We describe the on-shell method to deriving the Renormalization Group (RG) evolution of Wilson coefficients of high dimensional operators at one loop, which is a necessary part in the on-shell construction of the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT), and exceptionally efficient based on the amplitude basis in hand. The UV divergence is obtained by firstly calculating the coefficients of scalar bubble integrals by unitary cuts, then subtracting the IR divergence in the massless bubbles, which can be easily read from the collinear factors we obtained for the Standard Model fields. Examples of deriving the anomalous dimensions at dimension six are presented in a pedagogical manner. We also give the results of contributions from the dimension-8 $H^4D^4$ operators to the running of $V^+V^-H^2$ operators, as well as the running of $B^+B^-H^2D^{2n}$ from $H^4D^{2n+4}$ for general $n$.