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

Understand

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.