The Self-Force Problem: Local Behaviour of the Detweiler-Whiting Singular Field

Abstract

The growing reality of gravitational wave astronomy is giving age-old problems a new lease of life; one such problem is that of the self-force. A charged or massive particle moving in a curved background space-time produces a field that affects its motion, pushing it off its expected geodesic. This self-field gives rise to a so-called self-force acting on the particle. In modelling this motion, the self-force approach uses a perturbative expansion in the mass ratio. One of the most interesting sources of gravitational waves are extreme mass ratio inspirals - systems perfectly suited to self-force modelling. One of the key problems within the self-force model is the divergence of the field at the particle. To resolve this, the field is split into a singular component and a smooth regular field. This regular-singular split, introduced by Detweiler and Whiting, is used in most modern self-force calculations. In this thesis, we derive high-order expansions of the Detweiler-Whiting singular field, and use these to push the boundaries on current precision limits of self-force calculations. Within the mode-sum scheme, we give over 14 previously unknown regularisation parameters, almost doubling the current regularisation parameter database. We also produce smooth effective sources to high order, and propose an application of the higher terms to improve accuracy in the m-mode scheme. Finally, we investigate the status of the cosmic censorship conjecture and the role that the self-force plays. To this end, we give regularisation parameters for non-geodesic motion. We also show the necessity of our results in the exciting area of second order self-force calculations, which benefit significantly from high-order coordinate expansions of the singular field. We calculate several parameters that these schemes require, and highlight the further advancements possible from the results of this thesis.