Gravitational multipoles, antipodal matching relations, and the logarithmic soft graviton theorem

Abstract

We derive the classical logarithmic soft graviton theorem for the scattering of massive particles in four-dimensional asymptotically flat spacetime using a position-space analysis of the Weyl tensor. Starting from the Iyer-Damour multipole solution in harmonic gauge, we obtain an infinite tower of antipodal matching relations across spatial infinity for all five Newman-Penrose Weyl scalars, at linear order in $G$ and for the leading matter-induced logarithms at order $G^2$. We connect the relation relevant to the logarithmic soft theorem to the radiative-gauge formulation of Boschetti-Campiglia and Compère-Robert. We then compute the required asymptotic fields directly from scattering data, including matter contributions and nonlinear effects responsible for graviton drag. Combining these results with the Newman-Penrose evolution equations yields position-space proofs of the classical leading and logarithmic soft graviton theorems, independently confirming the frequency-space derivation of the latter originally performed by Laddha and Sen.