Nonlinear gravitational self-force. I. Field outside a small body

Abstract

A small extended body moving through an external spacetime $g_{\alpha\beta}$ creates a metric perturbation $h_{\alpha\beta}$, which forces the body away from geodesic motion in $g_{\alpha\beta}$. The foundations of this effect, called the gravitational self-force, are now well established, but concrete results have mostly been limited to linear order. Accurately modeling the dynamics of compact binaries requires proceeding to nonlinear orders. To that end, I show how to obtain the metric perturbation outside the body at all orders in a class of generalized wave gauges. In a small buffer region surrounding the body, the form of the perturbation can be found analytically as an expansion for small distances $r$ from a representative worldline. Given only a specification of the body's multipole moments, the field obtained in the buffer region suffices to find the metric everywhere outside the body via a numerical puncture scheme. Following this procedure at first and second order, I calculate the field in the buffer region around an arbitrarily structured compact body at sufficiently high order in $r$ to numerically implement a second-order puncture scheme, including effects of the body's spin. I also define $n$th-order (local) generalizations of the Detweiler-Whiting singular and regular fields and show that in a certain sense, the body can be viewed as a skeleton of multipole moments.