Energy and periastron advance of compact binaries on circular orbits at the fourth post-Newtonian order

Abstract

In this paper, we revisit and complete our preceding work on the Fokker Lagrangian describing the dynamics of compact binary systems at the fourth post-Newtonian (4PN) order in harmonic coordinates. We clarify the impact of the non-local character of the Fokker Lagrangian or the associated Hamiltonian on both the conserved energy and the relativistic periastron precession for circular orbits. We show that the non-locality of the action, due to the presence of the tail effect at the 4PN order, gives rise to an extra contribution to the conserved integral of energy with respect to the Hamiltonian computed on shell, which was not taken into account in our previous work. We also provide a direct derivation of the periastron advance by taking carefully into account this non-locality. We then argue that the infra-red (IR) divergences in the calculation of the gravitational part of the action are problematic, which motivates us to introduce a second ambiguity parameter, in addition to the one already assumed previously. After fixing these two ambiguity parameters by requiring that the conserved energy and the relativistic periastron precession for circular orbits are in agreement with numerical and analytical gravitational self-force calculations, valid in the limiting case of small mass ratio, we find that our resulting Lagrangian is physically equivalent to the one obtained in the ADM Hamiltonian approach.

31 pages, 1 figure, matches the published version

References in corpus (7)

• Fourth post-Newtonian effective one-body dynamics
• High-Order Post-Newtonian Fit of the Gravitational Self-Force for Circular Orbits in the Schwarzschild Geometry
• Precession effect of the gravitational self-force in a Schwarzschild spacetime and the effective one-body formalism
• The dynamics of the gravitational two-body problem at fourth post-Newtonian order and at quadratic order in the Newton constant
• Tail effects in the third post-Newtonian gravitational wave energy flux of compact binaries in quasi-elliptical orbits
• Self-force corrections to the periapsis advance around a spinning black hole
• Gravitational-wave tail effects to quartic non-linear order