English

Eccentric self-forced inspirals into a rotating black hole

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2022-08-04 v2

Abstract

We develop the first model for extreme mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs) into a rotating massive black hole driven by the gravitational self-force. Our model is based on an action angle formulation of the method of osculating geodesics for eccentric, equatorial (i.e., spin-aligned) motion in Kerr spacetime. The forcing terms are provided by an efficient spectral interpolation of the first-order gravitational self-force in the outgoing radiation gauge. We apply a near-identity (averaging) transformation to eliminate all dependence of the orbital phases from the equations of motion, while maintaining all secular effects of the first-order gravitational self-force at post-adiabatic order. This implies that the model can be evolved without having to resolve all O(105)\mathcal{O}(10^5) orbit cycles of an EMRI, yielding an inspiral model that can be evaluated in less than a second for any mass-ratio. In the case of a non-rotating central black hole, we compare inspirals evolved using self-force data computed in the Lorenz and radiation gauges. We find that the two gauges generally produce differing inspirals with a deviation of comparable magnitude to the conservative self-force correction. This emphasizes the need for including the (currently unknown) dissipative second order self-force to obtain gauge independent, post-adiabatic waveforms.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2112.05651,
  title  = {Eccentric self-forced inspirals into a rotating black hole},
  author = {Philip Lynch and Maarten van de Meent and Niels Warburton},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.05651},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

46 pages, 12 figures