Evolution of inspiral orbits around a Schwarzschild black hole

TL;DR

This paper models the orbital evolution of eccentric binaries with extreme mass ratios around Schwarzschild black holes, incorporating full gravitational self-force effects, including conservative corrections, to improve gravitational-wave waveform accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces a novel inspiral model using osculating geodesics that fully incorporates conservative gravitational self-force effects with an analytic interpolation formula.

Findings

Conservative GSF corrections significantly affect waveform models.

The interpolation formula accurately captures GSF effects across many orbits.

Including GSF improves gravitational-wave search precision.

Abstract

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.