Inclusive Radiation and Backreaction from the Phase-Space S-Matrix

Abstract

We develop a phase-space description of classical scattering in which the matter sector of the Dyson S-matrix is partially Weyl transformed while the radiation sector remains operator valued. The resulting S-matrix symbol provides a common origin for several classical observables: we show that the inclusive waveform, the classical displacement in phase-space (i.e. the impulse and position shift), and the angular momentum arise as different projections of the same object. We show that the partially Weyl-transformed $S$-matrix admits an exponential organisation in terms of an elastic phase and connected radiation kernels, while its inclusive one-point projection admits a coherent representative with waveshape $α_I$ describing classical radiation, extending our recent proposal. Furthermore, we show explicitly how nonlinear gravitational memory can be derived from an inclusive coherent waveshape. The dependence of the waveshape on the hard scattering data naturally leads to a quantum geometry, including an induced Berry connection on the space of waveforms, whose contribution to the phase-space displacement captures both radiation-reaction and static-field effects. We illustrate this structure by deriving static contributions to the position shift and field angular momentum in both scalar QED and gravity.