Radiative Matching Across a Projector Bridge

Abstract

Two distinct Einstein--Hilbert sectors are related by a covariant correspondence bridge that maps stress-energy through bitensor kernels. The Bianchi identities enforce conservation, with bridge stresses balancing cross-sector exchange. For positive gravitational couplings and paired Minkowski backgrounds, a fixed metric-independent bridge leaves the quadratic action block diagonal, so the vacuum contains two massless spin-2 fields and no Fierz--Pauli mass term. A reciprocal first--order transport law generates a flux--preserving rotation of the canonical outgoing data. This divides the emitted power between visible and hidden channels while preserving the total quadrupole luminosity and the general-relativistic chirp phase. The reduced visible amplitude produces a systematic standard-siren distance shift, whose present sensitivity can be estimated from gravitational--wave catalog cosmology combined with an independent distance calibration. A source--level rescaling is physically inequivalent: it changes radiation reaction and requires compensating bridge energy flow. The construction therefore describes amplitude transfer between massless tensor channels, distinct from massive-graviton dispersion and propagation-induced oscillations.