Caltech/JPL Association for Gravitational-Wave Research Seminar

Compact binary systems are among the most promising sources for ground-based and future space-based gravitational-wave detectors. In order to detect their feeble signals in a noisy experimental setting and to measure the astrophysical properties of the binary systems accurately, we need precise theoretical predictions of the expected gravitational waveforms. My talk will introduce the effective-field-theory framework known as NRGR, and describe how it is applied to compute gravitational-wave signals from compact binary inspirals. The use of point particle sources to model the compact objects gives rise to divergences, which need to be absorbed by renormalization. This apparent shortcoming is in fact a virtue of the effective-field-theory approach, since it implies a classical renormalization group running of the multipole moments and provides a novel way to derive factorized gravitational waveforms, allowing us to resum logarithmic terms to all orders in the post-Newtonian expansion. Furthermore, I will discuss recent progress in calculating gravitational-wave observables for binaries with rapidly rotating compact objects, where the effects of spin interaction are important.