Niels Warburton

Evolution of inspiral orbits around a Schwarzschild black hole

We present results from calculations of the orbital evolution in eccentric binaries of nonrotating black holes with extreme mass-ratios. Our inspiral model is based on the method of osculating geodesics, and is the first to incorporate the full gravitational self-force (GSF) effect, including conservative corrections. The GSF information is encapsulated in an analytic interpolation formula based on numerical GSF data for over a thousand sample geodesic orbits. We assess the importance of including conservative GSF corrections in waveform models for gravitational-wave searches.

Tidal invariants for compact binaries on quasicircular orbits

we dene and calculate at O( ) (conservative) shifts in the eigenvalues of the electric- and magnetic-type tidal tensors, and a (dissipative) shift in a scalar product between their eigenbases. This approach yields four gauge-invariant functions, from which one may construct other tidal quantities such as the curvature scalars and the speciality index. First, we analyze the general case of a geodesic in a regular perturbed vacuum spacetime admitting a helical Killing vector and a reection symmetry. Next, we specialize to focus on circular orbits in the equatorial plane of Kerr spacetime at O( ). We present accurate numerical results for the Schwarzschild case for orbital radii up to the light-ring, calculated via independent implementations in Lorenz and Regge-Wheeler gauges. We show that our results are consistent with leading-order post-Newtonian expansions, and demonstrate the existence of additional structure in the strong-eld regime. We anticipate that our strong-eld results will inform (e.g.) eective

Gravitational Self-Torque and Spin Precession in Compact Binaries

We calculate the effect of self-interaction on the “geodetic” spin precession of a compact body in a strong-field orbit around a black hole. Specifically, we consider the spin precession angle ? per radian of orbital revolution for a particle carrying mass ? and spin s?(G/c)?2 in a circular orbit around a Schwarzschild black hole of mass M??. We compute ? through O(?/M) in perturbation theory, i.e, including the correction ?? (obtained numerically) due to the torque exerted by the conservative piece of the gravitational self-field. Comparison with a post-Newtonian (PN) expression for ??, derived here through 3PN order, shows good agreement but also reveals strong-field features which are not captured by the latter approximation. Our results can inform semianalytical models of the strong-field dynamics in astrophysical binaries, important for ongoing and future gravitational-wave searches

Gravitational Self-Force Correction to the Innermost Stable Circular Equatorial Orbit of a Kerr Black Hole

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 holes 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.

Self force on a scalar charge in Kerr spacetime: eccentric equatorial orbits

We present a numerical code for calculating the self force on a scalar charge moving in a bound (eccentric) geodesic in the equatorial plane of a Kerr black hole. We work in the frequency domain and make use of the method of extended homogeneous solutions [Phys.\ Rev.\ D {\bf 78}, 084021 (2008)], in conjunction with mode-sum regularization. Our work is part of a program to develop a computational architecture for fast and efficient self-force calculations, alternative to time-domain methods. We find that our frequency-domain method outperforms existing time-domain schemes for small eccentricities, and, remarkably, remains competitive up to eccentricities as high as

Particle on the Innermost Stable Circular Orbit of a Rapidly Spinning Black Hole

\sim 0.7

Isofrequency pairing of geodesic orbits in Kerr geometry

. As an application of our code we (i) compute the conservative scalar-field self-force correction to the innermost stable circular equatorial orbit, as a function of the Kerr spin parameter; and (ii) calculate the variation in the rest mass of the scalar particle along the orbit, caused by the component of the self force tangent to the four-velocity.

Frequency-domain algorithm for the Lorenz-gauge gravitational self-force

We compute the radiation emitted by a particle on the innermost stable circular orbit of a rapidly spinning black hole both (a) analytically, working to leading order in the deviation from extremality and (b) numerically, with a new high-precision Teukolsky code. We find excellent agreement between the two methods. We confirm previous estimates of the overall scaling of the power radiated, but show that there are also small oscillations all the way to extremality. Furthermore, we reveal an intricate mode-by-mode structure in the flux to infinity, with only certain modes having the dominant scaling. The scaling of each mode is controlled by its conformal weight, a quantity that arises naturally in the representation theory of the enhanced near-horizon symmetry group. We find relationships to previous work on particles orbiting in precisely extreme Kerr, including detailed agreement of quantities computed here with conformal field theory calculations performed in the context of the Kerr/CFT correspondence.

Highly eccentric inspirals into a black hole

Abstract ? Bound geodesic orbits around a Kerr black hole can be parametrized by three constants of the motion: the (specific) orbital energy, angular momentum, and Carter constant. Generically, each orbit also has associated with it three frequencies, related to the radial, longitudinal, and (mean) azimuthal motions. Here, we note the curious fact that these two ways of characterizing bound geodesics are not in a one-to-one correspondence. While the former uniquely specifies an orbit up to initial conditions, the latter does not: there is a (strong-field) region of the parameter space in which pairs of physically distinct orbits can have the same three frequencies. In each such isofrequency pair, the two orbits exhibit the same rate of periastron precession and the same rate of Lense-Thirring precession of the orbital plane, and (in a certain sense) they remain “synchronized” in phase.

Applying the effective-source approach to frequency-domain self-force calculations

State-of-the-art computations of the gravitational self-force (GSF) on massive particles in black hole spacetimes involve numerical evolution of the metric perturbation equations in the time domain, which is computationally very costly. We present here a new strategy based on a frequency-domain treatment of the perturbation equations, which offers considerable computational saving. The essential ingredients of our method are (i) a Fourier-harmonic decomposition of the Lorenz-gauge metric perturbation equations and a numerical solution of the resulting coupled set of ordinary equations with suitable boundary conditions; (ii) a generalized version of the method of extended homogeneous solutions [L. Barack, A. Ori, and N. Sago, Phys. Rev. D 78, 084021 (2008)] used to circumvent the Gibbs phenomenon that would otherwise hamper the convergence of the Fourier mode sum at the particle’s location; (iii) standard mode-sum regularization, which finally yields the physical GSF as a sum over regularized modal contributions. We present a working code that implements this strategy to calculate the Lorenz-gauge GSF along eccentric geodesic orbits around a Schwarzschild black hole. The code is far more efficient than existing time-domain methods; the gain in computation speed (at a given precision) is about an order of magnitude at an eccentricity of 0.2, and up to 3 orders of magnitude for circular or nearly circular orbits. This increased efficiency was crucial in enabling the recently reported calculation of the long-term orbital evolution of an extreme mass ratio inspiral [N. Warburton, S. Akcay, L. Barack, J.?R. Gair, and N. Sago, Phys. Rev. D 85, 061501(R) (2012)]. Here we provide full technical details of our method to complement the above report.