Ramanujan Auditorium

New perspectives on the relativistic binary problem

Jan Steinhoff

MPI Potsdam

Continuing the success of gravitational wave observations requires a large effort on improving their theoretical predictions in the next decade, in order to keep their accuracy on par with improvements of the detectors. This requires innovations on the methods by which gravitational waves from compact binaries are calculated. In this talk, we focus on new approaches to analytic, perturbative predictions for relativistic binaries inspired by high-energy physics. In this area, effective field theories are highly useful and
scattering amplitudes (the primary observable) can be calculated very efficiently using novel tools. These methods can indeed be applied the classical binaries and their gravitational waves. We give a basic introduction to the ideas of these approaches and recent progress.