by Tanguy Marchand, Luc Blanchet and Guillame Faye.

With the spectacular discoveries by the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration of gravitational waves from the coalescence of black-hole binaries, we foresee the possibility of extremely accurate measurements of the so-called post-Newtonian (PN) coefficients that describe the gravitational waveform of these systems in the inspiral phase prior to the final coalescence. The PN coefficients are especially important because they probe the non-linear structure of general relativity (GR) and provide thus very constraining tests of this theory. In turn, they permit accurate measurements of the physical parameters of the binary, essentially the mass of the compact objects and their moment of rotation or spin.

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Guillaume Faye is Chargé de Recherche (researcher)

The gravitational-wave observatory Advanced LIGO is now in its commissioning stage and preparing for its first scientific runs in early 2015. It will be soon followed by the Advanced Virgo detector. Being reasonably optimistic, one can expect the first detections to occur by 2018. The most likely sources to be observed are coalescences of two compact objects. As both detection and
parameter estimation rely on matched filtering techniques, several programs to compute accurate waveform models using various approximation techniques are being pursued. Notably, the post-Newtonian perturbative approach, where all quantities of interest are expanded in powers of Continue reading →