Leading soft theorems on plane wave backgrounds

Abstract: The infrared singularities of scattering amplitudes have historically contributed to much development in understanding fundamental structures in physics. However, the fate of the leading soft singularities of amplitudes in non-trivial background fields has remained largely unknown. In this paper, we derive the leading soft theorems for photons, gluons and gravitons on generic plane wave backgrounds in gauge theory and gravity. The results differ from the flat space results through dependence on the initial conditions of the soft mediator. We also consider the special case of self-dual plane wave backgrounds, and match onto the flat space results when the background is treated perturbatively.