Talk detail

Participant	Le Tiec, Alexandre
Institution	University of Maryland - John S. Toll Physics Building - College Park - MD - USA

Session	AN1	Accepted	Yes	Order	1	Time	14:00 - 14:25
Talk	Oral abstract	Title	The first law of binary black hole mechanics in General Relativity and post-Newtonian theory
Co-authors	L. Blanchet and B. F. Whiting
Abstract	First laws of black hole mechanics, or thermodynamics, come in a variety of different forms. We establish a first law of mechanics for binary systems of point masses moving along circular orbits. This relation is derived from first principles in General Relativity, and is explicitly shown to hold up to very high orders in the post-Newtonian approximation. Analogies are drawn with the single and binary black hole cases, revealing intriguing formal relations between point masses and black holes. Several applications to gravitational-wave source modeling are discussed, such as the computation of the binding energy E and total angular momentum J of the binary system, at leading order beyond the test-particle approximation. The resulting expression for the coordinate invariant relation E(J) is shown to agree remarkably well with the exact results from recent numerical simulations of comparable-mass non-spinning black hole binaries.

Session	AN2/3	Accepted	Yes	Order	1	Time	14:00 - 14:26	23' + 3'
Talk	Oral abstract	Title	Advances at the interface between the self-force formalism and numerical relativity
Co-authors	L. Barack, E. Barausse, A. Buonanno, A. H. Mroue, H. P. Pfeiffer, N. Sago, A. Taracchini
Abstract	The strong-field dynamics of binary black holes can be investigated using the perturbative self-force (SF) formalism, as well as fully non-linear numerical relativity (NR) simulations. The predictions of SF theory and NR can be compared using coordinate-invariant relations. We will review two such recent comparisons, based on the (Mercury-type) periastron advance and the binding energy, in the case of non-spinning black hole binaries on quasi-circular orbits. In both cases, the predictions of the SF formalism are found to be in very good agreement with the results of NR, even for comparable masses. Black hole perturbation theory may thus find applications in a broader range of physical problems than originally envisaged, including the modelling of intermediate mass ratio inspirals, a plausible source of gravitational waves for Advanced LIGO/Virgo.