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Session 13 - Gravitational Effects.
Display session, Monday, June 10
Great Hall,
A calculation of the gravitational radiation emitted by a binary system (e.g., neutron stars, black holes) involves solving numerically extremely complicated non-linear equations. A zeroth order approximation scheme has recently been developed based upon a conformally flat description (CFM) of the spatial part of the metric tensor. This assumption essentially neglects energy loss due to gravitational radiation. This is a good approach in cases where the radiation damping is so small that the system can be considered to be in a quasi-stable orbit. But the inclusion of the gravitational radiation energy loss becomes essential during the inspiral prior to coalescence. We describe here a method to incorporate the gravitational radiation into the CFM scheme by adding a perturbation term to the conformally flat metric tensor to account for the essentially non-diagonal character of the metric of the gravitational waves. The dynamical equations are solved to first order in the perturbation complementing the soluti on obtained from the CFM scheme.
