Title: The gravitational self-force
Asbtract:
The self-force describes the effect of a particle's own gravitational
field on its motion. While the motion is geodesic in the test-mass limit,
it is accelerated to first order in the particle's mass. In this talk I
review the foundations of the self-force, and show how the motion of a
small black hole can be determined by matched asymptotic expansions of a
perturbed metric. I next consider the case of a point mass, and show that
while the retarded field is singular on the world line, it can be
unambiguously decomposed into a singular piece that exerts no force, and a
smooth remainder that is responsible for the acceleration. I also describe
the recent efforts, by a number of workers, to compute the self-force in
the case of a small body moving in the field of a much more massive black
hole. The motivation for this work is provided in part by the Laser
Interferometer Space Antenna, which will be sensitive to low-frequency
gravitational waves. Among the sources for this detector is the motion of
small compact objects around massive (galactic) black holes. To calculate
the waves emitted by such systems requires a detailed understanding of the
motion, beyond the test-mass approximation. A written version of this talk
can be downloaded from http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/0410127.