Talk detail

Participant	Hughes, Scott
Institution	Dept of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology - 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 37-626C - Cambridge - Massachusetts - USA

Session	BN5	Accepted		Order	Time
Talk	Oral abstract	Title	Adiabatic and post-adiabatic approaches to extreme mass ratio inspiral
Coauthors
Abstract	Extreme mass ratio inspirals (EMRIs) show a strong separation of timescales, with the time characterizing inspiral, T_i, much longer than any time T_o characterizing orbital motions. The ratio of these timescales (which is essentially an EMRI's mass ratio) can thus be regarded as a perturbative expansion parameter. In this talk, I will describe the value and limitations of an "adiabatic" description of these binaries, which essentially uses only the leading terms arising from such a two-timescale expansion. An adibatic approach breaks down when orbits evolve through resonances, with important observational and dynamical consequences. I will describe the "post-adiabatic" techniques we are developing to study the evolution of systems through these resonances, and to improve our ability to model EMRI systems more generally.
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