Soft-Collinear Gravity and Soft Theorems

Abstract

This chapter reviews the construction of ``soft-collinear gravity'', the effective field theory which describes the interaction of collinear and soft gravitons with matter (and themselves), to all orders in the soft-collinear power expansion, focusing on the essential concepts. Among them are an emergent soft background gauge symmetry, which lives on the light-like trajectories of energetic particles and allows for a manifestly gauge-invariant representation of the interactions in terms of a soft covariant derivative and the soft Riemann tensor, and a systematic treatment of collinear interactions, which are absent at leading power in gravity. The gravitational soft theorems are derived from soft-collinear gravity at the Lagrangian level. The symmetries of the effective theory provide a transparent explanation of why soft graviton emission is universal to sub-sub-leading power, but gauge boson emission is not and suggest a physical interpretation of the form of the universal soft factors in terms of the charges corresponding to the soft symmetries. The power counting of soft-collinear gravity further provides an understanding of the structure of loop corrections to the soft theorems.