Gravitational radiation reaction

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in understanding gravitational radiation reaction on particles orbiting black holes, focusing on techniques to accurately model gravitational waveforms for inspiraling binary systems with large mass ratios.

Contribution

It introduces new concepts and methods for calculating the gravitational self-force to improve orbital evolution models in extreme mass ratio inspirals.

Findings

Development of new computational techniques for gravitational self-force

Enhanced understanding of orbital evolution under radiation reaction

Progress towards precise gravitational waveform modeling

Abstract

We give a short personally-biased review on the recent progress in our understanding of gravitational radiation reaction acting on a point particle orbiting a black hole. The main motivation of this study is to obtain sufficiently precise gravitational waveforms from inspiraling binary compact stars with a large mass ratio. For this purpose, various new concepts and techniques have been developed to compute the orbital evolution taking into account the gravitational self-force. Combining these ideas with a few supplementary new ideas, we try to outline a path to our goal here.