Gravitational radiation reaction and inspiral waveforms in the adiabatic limit

TL;DR

This paper advances the modeling of gravitational waves from a small object spiraling into a massive black hole by developing tools to compute energy fluxes, waveforms, and orbital evolution for generic orbits, crucial for future gravitational wave detection.

Contribution

It introduces new computational methods for fluxes and waveforms of generic orbits and incorporates the adiabatic self-force for accurate inspiral modeling in general relativity.

Findings

First-time computation of radiated fluxes and waveforms for generic geodesic orbits.

Development of a method to evolve inspirals using energy and angular momentum conservation.

Waveforms generated are expected to be sufficiently accurate for gravitational-wave searches.

Abstract

We describe progress evolving an important limit of binary orbits in general relativity, that of a stellar mass compact object gradually spiraling into a much larger, massive black hole. These systems are of great interest for gravitational wave observations. We have developed tools to compute for the first time the radiated fluxes of energy and angular momentum, as well as instantaneous snapshot waveforms, for generic geodesic orbits. For special classes of orbits, we compute the orbital evolution and waveforms for the complete inspiral by imposing global conservation of energy and angular momentum. For fully generic orbits, inspirals and waveforms can be obtained by augmenting our approach with a prescription for the self force in the adiabatic limit derived by Mino. The resulting waveforms should be sufficiently accurate to be used in future gravitational-wave searches.