Speaker
Description
Field theoretic approaches, perfectly tailored for computations perturbative in Newton’s constant, have had great success in producing state-of-the-art results for the gravitational two-body problem. On the other hand, metrics such as the Schwarzschild metric and geodesic trajectories in these spacetimes carry information to all orders in the gravitational constant and can be interpreted as resummations of infinite classes of Feynman diagrams. In this talk, I will describe recent work that seeks to leverage the all-orders-in-G information encoded in classical solutions to simplify post-Minkowskian computations. Dynamics beyond the leading order in mass ratio are described by an effective field theory with a systematic mass ratio expansion. The EFT naturally provides “recoil operators” that encode the back-reaction caused by the effect of the test body on the background.
