766 research outputs found
What can we learn about neutron stars from gravity-wave observations?
In the next few years, the first detections of gravity-wave signals using
Earth-based interferometric detectors will begin to provide precious new
information about the structure and dynamics of compact bodies such as neutron
stars. The intrinsic weakness of gravity-wave signals requires a proactive
approach to modeling the prospective sources and anticipating the shape of the
signals that we seek to detect. Full-blown 3-D numerical simulations of the
sources are playing and will play an important role in planning the
gravity-wave data-analysis effort. I review some recent analytical and
numerical work on neutron stars as sources of gravity waves.Comment: Revtex 4, 3 EPS figures. To appear in the proceedings of the 25th J.
Hopkins Workshop on Current Problems in Particle Theory; 2001: A Relativistic
Spacetime Odyssey, Florence, Sep. 3--5, 200
Ephemeral point-events: is there a last remnant of physical objectivity?
For the past two decades, Einstein's Hole Argument (which deals with the
apparent indeterminateness of general relativity due to the general covariance
of the field equations) and its resolution in terms of Leibniz equivalence (the
statement that Riemannian geometries related by active diffeomorphisms
represent the same physical solution) have been the starting point for a lively
philosophical debate on the objectivity of the point-events of space-time. It
seems that Leibniz equivalence makes it impossible to consider the points of
the space-time manifold as physically individuated without recourse to
dynamical individuating fields. Various authors have posited that the metric
field itself can be used in this way, but nobody so far has considered the
problem of explicitly distilling the metrical fingerprint of point-events from
the gauge-dependent components of the metric field. Working in the Hamiltonian
formulation of general relativity, and building on the results of Lusanna and
Pauri (2002), we show how Bergmann and Komar's intrinsic pseudo-coordinates
(based on the value of curvature invariants) can be used to provide a physical
individuation of point-events in terms of the true degrees of freedom (the
Dirac observables) of the gravitational field, and we suggest how this
conceptual individuation could in principle be implemented with a well-defined
empirical procedure. We argue from these results that point-events retain a
significant kind of physical objectivity.Comment: LaTeX, natbib, 34 pages. Final journal versio
Marzke-Wheeler coordinates for accelerated observers in special relativity
In special relativity, the definition of coordinate systems adapted to
generic accelerated observers is a long-standing problem, which has found
unequivocal solutions only for the simplest motions. We show that the
Marzke-Wheeler construction, an extension of the Einstein synchronization
convention, produces accelerated systems of coordinates with desirable
properties: (a) they reduce to Lorentz coordinates in a neighborhood of the
observers' world-lines; (b) they index continuously and completely the causal
envelope of the world-line (that is, the intersection of its causal past and
its causal future: for well-behaved world-lines, the entire space-time). In
particular, Marzke-Wheeler coordinates provide a smooth and consistent
foliation of the causal envelope of any accelerated observer into space-like
surfaces.
We compare the Marzke-Wheeler procedure with other definitions of accelerated
coordinates; we examine it in the special case of stationary motions, and we
provide explicit coordinate transformations for uniformly accelerated and
uniformly rotating observers. Finally, we employ the notion of Marzke-Wheeler
simultaneity to clarify the relativistic paradox of the twins, by pinpointing
the local origin of differential aging.Comment: AmsLaTeX, 22 pages, 8 eps figures; revised, references added. To
appear in Foundations of Physics Letters, October 200
Detection template families for gravitational waves from the final stages of binary--black-hole inspirals: Nonspinning case
We investigate the problem of detecting gravitational waves from binaries of
nonspinning black holes with masses m = 5--20 Msun, moving on quasicircular
orbits, which are arguably the most promising sources for first-generation
ground-based detectors. We analyze and compare all the currently available
post--Newtonian approximations for the relativistic two-body dynamics; for
these binaries, different approximations predict different waveforms. We then
construct examples of detection template families that embed all the
approximate models, and that could be used to detect the true
gravitational-wave signal (but not to characterize accurately its physical
parameters). We estimate that the fitting factor for our detection families is
>~0.95 (corresponding to an event-rate loss <~15%) and we estimate that the
discretization of the template family, for ~10^4 templates, increases the loss
to <~20%.Comment: 58 pages, 38 EPS figures, final PRD version; small corrections to GW
flux terms as per Blanchet et al., PRD 71, 129902(E)-129904(E) (2005
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