The gravitational self-force

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 contribution 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.Comment: 10 pages,2 postscript figures, revtex4. This article is based on a plenary lecture presented at GR1

Tidal deformation of a slowly rotating black hole

In the first part of this article I determine the geometry of a slowly rotating black hole deformed by generic tidal forces created by a remote distribution of matter. The metric of the deformed black hole is obtained by integrating the Einstein field equations in a vacuum region of spacetime bounded by r < r_max, with r_max a maximum radius taken to be much smaller than the distance to the remote matter. The tidal forces are assumed to be weak and to vary slowly in time, and the metric is expressed in terms of generic tidal quadrupole moments E_{ab} and B_{ab} that characterize the tidal environment. The metric incorporates couplings between the black hole's spin vector and the tidal moments, and captures all effects associated with the dragging of inertial frames. In the second part of the article I determine the tidal moments by immersing the black hole in a larger post-Newtonian system that includes an external distribution of matter; while the black hole's internal gravity is allowed to be strong, the mutual gravity between the black hole and the external matter is assumed to be weak. The post-Newtonian metric that describes the entire system is valid when r > r_min, where r_min is a minimum distance that must be much larger than the black hole's radius. The black-hole and post-Newtonian metrics provide alternative descriptions of the same gravitational field in an overlap r_min < r < r_max, and matching the metrics determine the tidal moments, which are expressed as post-Newtonian expansions carried out through one-and-a-half post-Newtonian order. Explicit expressions are obtained in the specific case in which the black hole is a member of a post-Newtonian two-body system.Comment: 32 pages, 2 figures, revised after referee comments, matches the published versio