Gravitational self-force in a Schwarzschild background and the effective one-body formalism

By T. Damour. 2009

135 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We discuss various ways in which the computation of conservative gravitational self-force (GSF) effects on a point mass moving in a Schwarzschild background can inform us about the basic building blocks of the effective one-body (EOB) Hamiltonian. We display the information which can be extracted from the recently published GSF calculation of the first-GSF-order shift of the orbital frequency of the last stable circular orbit, and we combine this information with the one recently obtained by comparing the EOB formalism to high-accuracy numerical relativity data on coalescing binary black holes. The information coming from GSF data helps to break the degeneracy (among some EOB parameters) which was left after using comparable-mass numerical relativity data to constrain the EOB formalism. We suggest various ways of obtaining more information from GSF computations: either by studying eccentric orbits, or by focusing on a special zero-binding zoom-whirl orbit. We show that logarithmic terms start entering the post-Newtonian expansions of various (EOB and GSF) functions at the fourth post-Newtonian level, and we analytically compute the first logarithm entering a certain, gauge-invariant 'redshift' GSF function (defined along the sequence of circular orbits).

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/28b6bdcf7f1e0f7fd76634a663e3b3f206537ce4

How researchers see this paper

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. T. Damour
2. Rafael A. Porto
3. A. Pound
4. G. Schāfer
5. P. Jaranowski
6. E. Poisson
7. I. Vega
8. G. Kalin

In Ocean Engineering

1. Rafael A. Porto
2. E. Poisson
3. A. Pound
4. I. Vega
5. P. Jaranowski
6. G. Schāfer
7. T. Damour

Citations in the corpus

• Classical and quantum scattering in post-Minkowskian gravity (2019, background): “[71] had pointed out the interest of extending the SF approach (which is usually applied only to circular, or near-circular, states) to scattering states, and showed what information it could give.”
• Nonlocal-in-time action for the fourth post-Newtonian conservative dynamics of two-body systems (2014, background): “Recently, several works have obtained a partial knowledge of the conservative dynamics at the 4th post-Newtonian (4PN) accuracy [15–23] (see also [24] for a closed-form expression valid to all PN-orders, at first order in Newton’s gravitational constant).”
• The Motion of Point Particles in Curved Spacetime (2003, methodology): “The mode-sum method was also used to compute unambiguous physical effects associated with the gravitational self-force [50, 157, 11], and these results were involved in detailed comparisons with post-Newtonian theory [50, 29, 28, 44, 11].”
• High-energy gravitational scattering and the general relativistic two-body problem (2017, background): “, [7, 48]) that the parameter u = GM/R is a monotonic parameter along the sequence of circular orbits (with 0 < u < 1 3 ), in terms of which one has”
• The Effective Field Theorist's Approach to Gravitational Dynamics (2016, background): “Finally, the presence of logarithmic corrections to the binding potential and mass/energy at 4PN order [114, 221] was re-discovered in [30, 32], as a consequence of the renormalization group structure of the effective theory.”