Energy and periastron advance of compact binaries on circular orbits at the fourth post-Newtonian order

TL;DR

This paper refines the 4PN dynamics of compact binaries, clarifying the non-local effects on energy and periastron precession, and resolves IR divergence issues to align with gravitational self-force results.

Contribution

It provides a complete analysis of non-local effects at 4PN order and introduces a second ambiguity parameter to reconcile theoretical calculations with numerical data.

Findings

Non-local tail effects contribute to energy and periastron precession.

Introduction of a second ambiguity parameter resolves IR divergence issues.

Results align with gravitational self-force calculations in the small mass ratio limit.

Abstract

In this paper, we revisit and complete our preceding work on the Fokker Lagrangian describing the dynamics of compact binary systems at the fourth post-Newtonian (4PN) order in harmonic coordinates. We clarify the impact of the non-local character of the Fokker Lagrangian or the associated Hamiltonian on both the conserved energy and the relativistic periastron precession for circular orbits. We show that the non-locality of the action, due to the presence of the tail effect at the 4PN order, gives rise to an extra contribution to the conserved integral of energy with respect to the Hamiltonian computed on shell, which was not taken into account in our previous work. We also provide a direct derivation of the periastron advance by taking carefully into account this non-locality. We then argue that the infra-red (IR) divergences in the calculation of the gravitational part of the action are problematic, which motivates us to introduce a second ambiguity parameter, in addition to the one already assumed previously. After fixing these two ambiguity parameters by requiring that the conserved energy and the relativistic periastron precession for circular orbits are in agreement with numerical and analytical gravitational self-force calculations, valid in the limiting case of small mass ratio, we find that our resulting Lagrangian is physically equivalent to the one obtained in the ADM Hamiltonian approach.