Gravitational self-force: orbital mechanics beyond geodesic motion

Barack, Leor (2014) Gravitational self-force: orbital mechanics beyond geodesic motion. Bičák, Jiří and Ledvinka, Tomáš (eds.) In General Relativity, Cosmology and Astrophysics: Perspectives 100 years after Einstein's stay in Prague. vol. 177, Springer Cham. pp. 147-168 . (doi:10.1007/978-3-319-06349-2_6).

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

The question of motion in a gravitationally bound two-body system is a longstanding open problem of General Relativity. When the mass ratio
is small, the problem lends itself to a perturbative treatment, wherein corrections to the geodesic motion of the smaller object (due to radiation reaction, internal structure, etc.) are accounted for order by order in
, using the language of an effective gravitational self-force. The prospect for observing gravitational waves from compact objects inspiralling into massive black holes in the foreseeable future has in the past 15 years motivated a program to obtain a rigorous formulation of the self-force and compute it for astrophysically interesting systems. I will give a brief survey of this activity and its achievements so far, and will identify the challenges that lie ahead. As concrete examples, I will discuss recent calculations of certain conservative post-geodesic effects of the self-force, including the correction to the precession rate of the periastron. I will highlight the way in which such calculations allow us to make a fruitful contact with other approaches to the two-body problem.

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