Conservative and radiative dynamics in classical relativistic scattering and bound systems

Understand

As recent work continues to demonstrate, the study of relativistic scattering processes leads to valuable insights and computational tools applicable to the relativistic bound-orbit two-body problem.

• This is particularly relevant in the post-Minkowskian approach to the gravitational two-body problem, where the field has only recently reached a full description of certain physical observables for scattering orbits, including radiative effects, at the third post-Minkowskian (3PM) order.
• As an historically instructive simpler example, we consider here the analogous problem in electromagnetism in flat spacetime.
• We compute for the first time the changes in linear momentum of each particle and the total radiated linear momentum, in the relativistic classical scattering of two point-charges, at sixth order in the charges (analogous to 3PM order in gravity).