On-Shell Amplitudes and Black-Hole Perturbations: Exact Reissner-Nordstr\"om Mixing

Abstract

Can flat-space on-shell amplitudes determine the channel basis of a coupled black-hole perturbation problem? We address this question for electromagnetic and gravitational perturbations of a Reissner-Nordstr\"{o}m (RN) black-hole. We organize the minimally coupled photon-graviton tree amplitudes off a heavy charged source into a $2\times 2$ channel-space matrix and perform a parity-resolved Jacob-Wick partial-wave projection. For every radiative multipole $\ell \geq 2$ and in both parity sectors, we show that the trace-free fixed-source partial-wave matrix is exactly proportional to the trace-free Moncrief coupling matrix, and therefore selects the same constant spectral projectors. Through a first-Born matching, the amplitudes determine the same eigenspaces in the leading $r^{-3}$ weak-field potential, but not the complete radial potentials. Using the exact classical RN potentials as independent curved-background input, we show that these projectors persist throughout the full radial domain. We also explicitly retain finite-mass effects through $\mathcal{O}(\omega/m)$, finding a nonvanishing commutator with the Moncrief coupling matrix, which shows that the RN-projector alignment is spoiled by genuine two-body recoil effects. As a first step toward rotation, we further extract the representation-independent linear-spin term from a minimally coupled Dirac amplitude. We find that the complete tree-level channel matrix factorizes with a single linear-spin dressing, while the formal $J=2$ block fails to preserve the unchanged RN projectors. This restricted result does not constitute a test of Kerr-Newman separability, but it indicates that a rotating generalization must account for spin-induced angular-mode mixing. We expect that this on-shell method can be extended to more general long-range scattering systems with two asymptotic channels.