Tag Archives: two body problem

Fast Self-forced Inspirals

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by Niels Warburton and Maarten van de Meent

LISA will fly. Since being given the green light by the European Space Agency a year ago, the scientific consortium around the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) has been reorganising as it gears up to meet the challenge of building and operating a gravitational wave detector in space. This process has led to a renewed focus on the waveform templates that will be needed to extract the signals and estimate source parameters.

One of the key sources for LISA are extreme mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs). In these binaries a stellar mass compact object (such as a black hole or neutron star) spirals into a massive black hole. Emitting hundreds of thousands of gravitational wave cycles in the millihertz band, LISA will detect individual EMRIs for months or even years. The low instantaneous signal-to-noise-ratio of the gravitational waves necessitates accurate waveform templates that can be used with matched filtering techniques to extract the signal from the detectors data stream. Coherently matching a signal over months or even years requires going beyond leading-order, flux-based black hole perturbation models and calculating the so-called ‘self-force’ that drives the inspiral [1]. Roughly, one can think of this self-force as arising from the smaller orbiting body interacting with its own perturbation to the metric of the massive black hole. To this end the recent “LISA Data Analysis Work Packages” document defined a number of source-modelling challenges that must be overcome before LISA flies [2]. One of these requires the community to:

“Design and implement a framework for incorporating self-force-based numerical calculations, as they become available, into a flexible semi-analytical Kludge model that enables fast production of waveform templates”

Our work [3], “Fast Self-forced Inspirals”, is a response to this challenge. Continue reading →

Tails of gravitational waves and mechanics of compact binaries

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by Luc Blanchet and Alexandre Le Tiec

The first law of binary black hole mechanics can be extended to include non local tail effects.

Ever since Kepler’s discovery of the laws of planetary motion, the “two-body problem” has always played a central role in gravitational physics. In Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the simplest and most “universal,” purely gravitational, two-body problem is that of a binary system of black holes. The inspiral and merger of two compact objects (i.e. bodies whose radius is comparable to their mass, in “geometric” units where G = c = 1) produces copious amounts of gravitational radiation, as was recently discovered by LIGO’s multiple detections of gravitational waves from black hole binary systems.

capture

Alexandre Le Tiec (left) celebrates the detection of gravitational waves and Luc Blanchet (right) thinks about gravitational waves in Quy Nhon, Vietnam

In general relativity, the inspiral and onset of the merger of two compact objects is indeed universal, as it does not depend on the nature of the bodies, be they black holes or neutron stars, or possibly more exotic objects like boson stars or even naked singularities. However, the gravitational waves generated during the post-merger phase depend on the internal structure of the compact objects, and in the case of neutron stars should reveal many details about the scenario for the formation of the final black hole after merger, and the equation of state of nuclear matter deep inside the neutron stars

Continue reading →