MG12 - Talk detail
 

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The motion of vibrating systems in general relativity

In this talk we present the effects of vibrations at high frequencies onto a freely falling two-body system in Schwarzschild spacetime. We consider as a reference motion either a radial free fall or a circular orbit of the same system without vibrations. The vibrations induce a perturbation on the motion. In case of a circular reference motion its period is close to the orbital period, in agreement with the simpler situation of the Shirokov effect; the amplitude of the perturbation is dominated by high velocity effects, which grow linearly in the radius r0 of the circular orbit, while the leading term surviving the Newtonian limit decays as 1/r0. Thus even for very large radii a significant difference between Newtonian physics and general relativity is found. We present an estimate of this effect for some molecular vibrations of a system orbiting around the Earth.

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