15th Capra Meeting on Radiation Reaction in General Relativity

Second Order Gravitational Self-Force

Sam Gralla

University of Maryland
[SLIDES]

I give a first-principles derivation of a prescription for computing the first and second perturbed metric and motion of a small body moving through a vacuum background spacetime. The procedure involves solving for a ``regular field'' with a specified (sufficiently smooth) ``effective source'', and may be applied in any gauge that produces a sufficiently smooth regular field. The work is based on a formalism previously developed with R. Wald.