Revisiting the second post-Minkowskian eikonal and the dynamics of binary black holes

Abstract

The authors study the two-body gravitational scattering of massive scalars in general spacetime dimensions in the limit when both the energies and the impact parameter are large, which is relevant for the scattering of two black holes. The two- body scattering angle between the two black holes up to the second post- Minkowskian order (2PM) is extracted, which in various limits agrees with known results.