A conservative effect of the second-order gravitational self-force on quasicircular orbits in Schwarzschild spacetime

Abstract

A compact object moving on a quasicircular orbit about a Schwarzschild black hole gradually spirals inward due to the dissipative action of its gravitational self-force. But in addition to driving the inspiral, the self-force has a conservative piece. Within a second-order self-force formalism, I derive a second-order generalization of Detweiler's redshift variable, which provides a gauge-invariant measure of conservative effects on quasicircular orbits. I sketch a frequency-domain numerical scheme for calculating this quantity. Once this scheme has been implemented, its results may be used to determine high-order terms in post-Newtonian theory and parameters in effective-one-body theory.

20 pages, 1 figure, version to appear in PRD, additional references, minor typos corrected