Gravitational self-force correction to the innermost stable circular equatorial orbit of a Kerr Black Hole

Isoyama, Soichiro, Barack, Leor, Dolan, Sam, Le Tiec, Alexandre, Nakano, Hiroyuki, Shah, Abhay, Tanaka, Takahiro and Warburton, Niels (2014) Gravitational self-force correction to the innermost stable circular equatorial orbit of a Kerr Black Hole. Physical Review Letters, 113 (16), 1-5, [161101]. (doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.161101).

Abstract

For a self-gravitating particle of mass μ in orbit around a Kerr black hole of mass M≫μ, we compute the O(μ/M) shift in the frequency of the innermost stable circular equatorial orbit due to the conservative piece of the gravitational self-force acting on the particle. Our treatment is based on a Hamiltonian formulation of the dynamics in terms of geodesic motion in a certain locally defined effective smooth spacetime. We recover the same result using the so-called first law of binary black-hole mechanics. We give numerical results for the innermost stable circular equatorial orbit frequency shift as a function of the black hole’s spin amplitude, and compare with predictions based on the post-Newtonian approximation and the effective one-body model. Our results provide an accurate strong-field benchmark for spin effects in the general-relativistic two-body problem.

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Author: Leor Barack

Download statistics