Les Houches Lectures on Effective Field Theories and Gravitational Radiation

TL;DR

This paper reviews how effective field theories are applied to model gravitational radiation sources, focusing on binary stars, and discusses their use in gravitational wave physics for LIGO and LISA.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic approach using effective field theories to analyze gravitational wave emission from binary systems across multiple scales.

Findings

Constructed a hierarchy of effective theories for different scales in binary systems.

Clarified the application of EFT concepts like decoupling and matching in gravitational wave modeling.

Provided insights into calculating gravitational radiation from non-relativistic binaries.

Abstract

These lectures give an overview of the uses of effective field theories in describing gravitational radiation sources for LIGO or LISA. The first lecture reviews some of the standard ideas of effective field theory (decoupling, matching, power counting) mostly in the context of a simple toy model. The second lecture sets up the problem of calculating gravitational wave emission from non-relativistic binary stars by constructing a tower of effective theories that separately describe each scale in the problem: the internal size of each binary constituent, the orbital separation, and the wavelength of radiated gravitons.