TAPIR Seminar

Gravitational waves from the inspiral of a stellar-size black hole to a supermassive black hole can be accurately approximated by a point particle moving in a Kerr background.  At first order in the ratio of the masses, one must renormalize the perturbed metric to compute the deviation of the particle's path from a geodesic of the Kerr geometry.  The talk presents progress on computing the particle's acceleration ("self-force") in a gauge that is constructed from the gauge-invariant Weyl tensor -- from the solution to the Teukolsky equation.   Along the way, a computation of essentially gauge-invariant quantities allows one to find currently inaccessible parameters in the post-Newtonian expansion of of the energy and energy-flux of a compact binary.  Remarkably, we are able to extract analytic parameters from numerical computations that are accurate to better than one part in 10²²⁵.