arXiv subjects

George Doran

Publications and source records attributed to George Doran.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Memory effect from the scattering of Taub-NUT black holes

Taub-NUT black holes are somewhat exotic solutions to the vacuum Einstein equations, which have received limited attention in gravitational phenomenology. We use the soft behaviour of scattering amplitudes to compute the memory effect of the waveform resulting from the scattering of Kerr-Taub-NUT black holes. Due to the non-linear nature of gravity, NUT charges introduce intriguing features in the soft dynamics, which have no counterpart in the closely related setting of monopole charges in electromagnetism. In addition to this potentially realistic problem, we also comment on the purely academic problem in complexified gravity of the scattering of self-dual Taub-NUT black holes, which have been discussed recently in the context of celestial holography.

hep-th↗

arXiv2024

Light-cone actions and correlators of self-dual theories in AdS$_4$

Self-dual Yang-Mills and Einstein gravity in Euclidean AdS$_4$ are useful toy models because they can be described by simple scalar Lagrangians exhibiting a new manifestation of the colour/kinematics duality, as recently shown by two of the authors. In this paper, we clarify how the self-dual sectors fit into the full theories. In particular, we explicitly construct the light-cone action for Yang-Mills theory and Einstein gravity in AdS$_4$ in terms of positive and negative helicity fields, where we are able to pinpoint the self-dual sector as expected. We then show that the boundary correlators of these theories take a remarkably simple form in terms of Feynman diagrams in half of flat space, acted on by certain differential operators. We also analyse their soft limits and show that they exhibit Weinberg-like soft factors, where the soft pole which appears in scattering amplitudes is replaced by a derivative with respect to the energy.

hep-th↗

arXiv2024

On the anomaly interpretation of amplitudes in self-dual Yang-Mills and gravity

We investigate the integrability anomalies arising in the self-dual sectors of gravity and Yang-Mills theory, focusing on their connection to both the chiral anomaly and the trace anomaly. The anomalies in the self-dual sectors generate the one-loop all-plus amplitudes of gravitons and gluons, and have recently been studied via twistor constructions. On the one hand, we show how they can be interpreted as an anomaly of the chiral U(1) electric-magnetic-type duality in the self-dual sectors. We also note the similarity, for the usual fermionic chiral anomaly, between the 4D setting of self-dual Yang-Mills and the 2D setting of the Schwinger model. On the other hand, the anomalies in the self-dual theories also resemble the trace anomaly, sharing the same type of non-local effective action. We highlight the role of a Weyl-covariant fourth-order differential operator familiar from the trace anomaly literature, which (i) explains the conformal properties of the one-loop amplitudes, and (ii) indicates how this story may be extended to non-trivial spacetime backgrounds, e.g. with a cosmological constant. Moving beyond the self-dual sectors, and focusing on the gravity case, we comment on an intriguing connection to the two-loop ultraviolet divergence of pure gravity, whereby cancelling the anomaly at one-loop eliminates the two-loop divergence for the simplest helicity amplitudes.

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