Classical and Quantum Aspects of Gravitation and Cosmology

These are the proceedings of the XVIII Conference of the Indian Association for General Relativity and Gravitation (IAGRG) held at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Madras, INDIA during Feb. 15-17, 1996. The Conference was dedicated the late Prof. S. Chandrasekhar. The proceedings consists of 17 articles on: - Chandrasekhar's work (N. Panchapkesan); - Vaidya-Raychaudhuri Lecture (C.V. Vishveshwara) - Gravitational waves (B.R. Iyer, R. Balasubramanian) - Gravitational Collapse (T.P. Singh) - Accretion on black hole (S. Chakrabarti) - Cosmology (D. Munshi, S. Bharadwaj, G.S. Mohanty, P. Bhattacharjee); - Classical GR (S. Kar, D.C. Srivatsava) - Quantum aspects (J. Maharana, Saurya Das, P. Mitra, G. Date, N.D. Hari Dass) The body of THIS article contains ONLY the title, contents, foreword, organizing committees, preface, list of contributed talks and list of participants. The plenery talks are available at: http://www.imsc.ernet.in/physweb/Conf/ both as post-script files of individual articles and also as .uu source files. For further information please send e-mail to [email protected]: 12 pages, latex, needs psfig.tex macros. Latex the file run.tex. These Proceedings of the XVIII IAGRG Conference are available at http://www.imsc.ernet.in/physweb/Conf/ MINOR TYPO's in the ABSTRACT correcte

Workshop on gravitational waves

In this article we summarise the proceedings of the Workshop on Gravitational Waves held during ICGC-95. In the first part we present the discussions on 3PN calculations (L. Blanchet, P. Jaranowski), black hole perturbation theory (M. Sasaki, J. Pullin), numerical relativity (E. Seidel), data analysis (B.S. Sathyaprakash), detection of gravitational waves from pulsars (S. Dhurandhar), and the limit on rotation of relativistic stars (J. Friedman). In the second part we briefly discuss the contributed papers which were mainly on detectors and detection techniques of gravitational waves.Comment: 18 pages, kluwer.sty, no figure

Improved filters for gravitational waves from inspiraling compact binaries

The order of the post-Newtonian expansion needed to extract in a reliable and accurate manner the fully general relativistic gravitational wave signal from inspiraling compact binaries is explored. A class of approximate wave forms, called P-approximants, is constructed based on the following two inputs: (a) the introduction of two new energy-type and flux-type functions e(v) and f(v), respectively, (b) the systematic use of the Padé approximation for constructing successive approximants of e(v) and f(v). The new P-approximants are not only more effectual (larger overlaps) and more faithful (smaller biases) than the standard Taylor approximants, but also converge faster and monotonically. The presently available (v/c)^5-accurate post-Newtonian results can be used to construct P-approximate wave forms that provide overlaps with the exact wave form larger than 96.5%, implying that more than 90% of potential events can be detected with the aid of P-approximants as opposed to a mere 10–15 % that would be detectable using standard post-Newtonian approximants

Lagrangian perfect fluids and black hole mechanics

The first law of black hole mechanics (in the form derived by Wald), is expressed in terms of integrals over surfaces, at the horizon and spatial infinity, of a stationary, axisymmetric black hole, in a diffeomorphism invariant Lagrangian theory of gravity. The original statement of the first law given by Bardeen, Carter and Hawking for an Einstein-perfect fluid system contained, in addition, volume integrals of the fluid fields, over a spacelike slice stretching between these two surfaces. When applied to the Einstein-perfect fluid system, however, Wald's methods yield restricted results. The reason is that the fluid fields in the Lagrangian of a gravitating perfect fluid are typically nonstationary. We therefore first derive a first law-like relation for an arbitrary Lagrangian metric theory of gravity coupled to arbitrary Lagrangian matter fields, requiring only that the metric field be stationary. This relation includes a volume integral of matter fields over a spacelike slice between the black hole horizon and spatial infinity, and reduces to the first law originally derived by Bardeen, Carter and Hawking when the theory is general relativity coupled to a perfect fluid. We also consider a specific Lagrangian formulation for an isentropic perfect fluid given by Carter, and directly apply Wald's analysis. The resulting first law contains only surface integrals at the black hole horizon and spatial infinity, but this relation is much more restrictive in its allowed fluid configurations and perturbations than that given by Bardeen, Carter and Hawking. In the Appendix, we use the symplectic structure of the Einstein-perfect fluid system to derive a conserved current for perturbations of this system: this current reduces to one derived ab initio for this system by Chandrasekhar and Ferrari.Comment: 26 pages LaTeX-2

The Frenet Serret Description of Gyroscopic Precession

The phenomenon of gyroscopic precession is studied within the framework of Frenet-Serret formalism adapted to quasi-Killing trajectories. Its relation to the congruence vorticity is highlighted with particular reference to the irrotational congruence admitted by the stationary, axisymmetric spacetime. General precession formulae are obtained for circular orbits with arbitrary constant angular speeds. By successive reduction, different types of precessions are derived for the Kerr - Schwarzschild - Minkowski spacetime family. The phenomenon is studied in the case of other interesting spacetimes, such as the De Sitter and G\"{o}del universes as well as the general stationary, cylindrical, vacuum spacetimes.Comment: 37 pages, Paper in Late

Probing the non-linear structure of general relativity with black hole binaries

Observations of the inspiral of massive binary black holes (BBH) in the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) and stellar mass binary black holes in the European Gravitational-Wave Observatory (EGO) offer an unique opportunity to test the non-linear structure of general relativity. For a binary composed of two non-spinning black holes, the non-linear general relativistic effects depend only on the masses of the constituents. In a recent letter, we explored the possibility of a test to determine all the post-Newtonian coefficients in the gravitational wave-phasing. However, mutual covariances dilute the effectiveness of such a test. In this paper, we propose a more powerful test in which the various post-Newtonian coefficients in the gravitational wave phasing are systematically measured by treating three of them as independent parameters and demanding their mutual consistency. LISA (EGO) will observe BBH inspirals with a signal-to-noise ratio of more than 1000 (100) and thereby test the self-consistency of each of the nine post-Newtonian coefficients that have so-far been computed, by measuring the lower order coefficients to a relative accuracy of $\sim 10^{-5}$ (respectively, $\sim 10^{-4}$) and the higher order coefficients to a relative accuracy in the range $10^{-4}$-0.1 (respectively, $10^{-3}$-1).Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. Revised version, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev

AstroSat view of MAXI J1535-571: broadband spectro-temporal features

We present the results of Target of Opportunity (ToO) observations made with AstroSat of the newly discovered black hole binary MAXI J1535-571. We detect prominent C-type Quasi-periodic Oscillations (QPOs) of frequencies varying from 1.85 Hz to 2.88 Hz, along with distinct harmonics in all the AstroSat observations. We note that while the fundamental QPO is seen in the 3 - 50 keV energy band, the harmonic is not significant above ~ 35 keV. The AstroSat observations were made in the hard intermediate state, as seen from state transitions observed by MAXI and Swift. We attempt spectral modelling of the broadband data (0.7-80 keV) provided by AstroSat using phenomenological and physical models. The spectral modelling using nthComp gives a photon index in the range between 2.18-2.37 and electron temperature ranging from 21 to 63 keV. The seed photon temperature is within 0.19 to 0.29 keV. The high flux in 0.3 - 80 keV band corresponds to a luminosity varying from 0.7 to 1.07 L_Edd assuming the source to be at a distance of 8 kpc and hosting a black hole with a mass of 6 M$_{\odot}$. The physical model based on the two-component accretion flow gives disc accretion rates as high as ~ 1 $\dot{m}_{Edd}$ and halo rate ~ 0.2 $\dot{m}_{Edd}$ respectively. The near Eddington accretion rate seems to be the main reason for the unprecedented high flux observed from this source. The two-component spectral fitting of AstroSat data also provides an estimate of a black hole mass between 5.14 to 7.83 M$_{\odot}$.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, MNRAS (Accepted on 2019 May 10