English

Generic effective sources for first-order in mass-ratio gravitational self-force calculations in Schwarzschild spacetime

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2025-11-26 v2

Abstract

The numerical calculation of gravitational self-force in extreme mass ratio inspiral systems is fundamentally challenging due to the singular nature of point-particle sources. To overcome these difficulties, the effective source method offers an innovative alternative by replacing traditional regularization techniques with a reformulation of the problem. In this paper, we present the first fully analytic framework for constructing effective sources to compute the gravitational self-force for generic orbits in Schwarzschild spacetime. By reformulating the singular field through angular modulation in terms of a tetrad decomposition, the effective source can be constructed with the linear combination of scalar modes. The derived effective source is continuous across the particle's worldline, enabling efficient numerical implementation in 1+11+1 dimensions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.19732,
  title  = {Generic effective sources for first-order in mass-ratio gravitational self-force calculations in Schwarzschild spacetime},
  author = {Chao Zhang and Rong-gen Cai and Guoyang Fu and Yungui Gong and Xuchen Lu and Wenting Zhou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.19732},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

29 pages, 6 figures; comments are welcome, match the published version in PRD