Tidal invariants along the world line of an extended body in the Kerr spacetime

TL;DR

This paper investigates tidal invariants along the world line of an extended, spinning body with a quadrupole moment in Kerr spacetime, analyzing their properties for various orbital configurations and limits.

Contribution

It extends previous models by including spin and quadrupole effects in tidal invariants within Kerr spacetime, providing gauge-invariant analysis for circular and arbitrary orbits.

Findings

Tidal invariants are characterized for spinning bodies with quadrupole moments.

Eigenvalues and eigenvectors of tidal tensors are analyzed.

Limits to Schwarzschild spacetime are explored in different regimes.

Abstract

An extended body orbiting a compact object undergoes tidal deformations by the background gravitational field. Tidal invariants built up with the Riemann tensor and their derivatives evaluated along the world line of the body are essential tools to investigate both geometrical and physical properties of the tidal interaction. For example, one can determine the tidal potential in the neighborhood of the body by constructing a body-fixed frame, which requires Fermi-type coordinates attached to the body itself, the latter being in turn related to the spacetime metric and curvature along the considered world line. Similarly, in an effective field theory description of extended bodies finite size effects are taken into account by adding to the point mass action certain non-minimal couplings which involve integrals of tidal invariants along the orbit of the body. In both cases such a computation of tidal tensors is required. Here we consider the case of a spinning body also endowed with a non-vanishing quadrupole moment in a Kerr spacetime. The structure of the body is modeled by a multipolar expansion around the "center of mass line" according to the Mathisson-Papapetrou-Dixon model truncated at the quadrupolar order. The quadrupole tensor is assumed to be quadratic in spin, accounting for rotational deformations. The behavior of tidal invariants of both electric and magnetic type is discussed in terms of gauge-invariant quantities when the body is moving along a circular orbit as well as in the case of an arbitrary (equatorial) motion. The analysis is completed by examining the associated eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the tidal tensors. The limiting situation of the Schwarzschild solution is also explored both in the strong field regime and in the weak field limit.