Spinning binary dynamics in cubic effective field theories of gravity

We compute the classical tree-level five-point amplitude for the two-to-two scattering of spinning celestial objects with the emission of a graviton. Using this five-point amplitude, we then turn to the computation of the leading-order time-domain gravitational waveform. The method we describe is suitable for arbitrary values of classical spin of Kerr black holes and does not require any expansion in powers of the spin. In this paper we illustrate it in the simpler case of th...

We derive the equations of motion of spinning compact binaries including the spin-orbit (SO) coupling terms one post-Newtonian (PN) order beyond the leading-order effect. For black holes maximally spinning this corresponds to 2.5PN order. Our result for the equations of motion essentially confirms the previous result by Tagoshi, Ohashi and Owen. We also compute the spin-orbit effects up to 2.5PN order in the conserved (Noetherian) integrals of motion, namely the energy, the t...

Understanding the orbits of spinning bodies in curved spacetime is important for modeling binary black hole systems with small mass ratios. At zeroth order in mass ratio, the smaller body moves on a geodesic. Post-geodesic effects are needed to model the system accurately. One very important post-geodesic effect is the gravitational self-force, which describes the small body's interaction with its own contribution to a binary's spacetime. Another post-geodesic effect, the spi...

We introduce a formulation for spinning gravitating objects in the effective field theory in the post-Newtonian scheme in the context of the binary inspiral problem. We aim at an effective action, where all field modes below the orbital scale are integrated out. We spell out the relevant degrees of freedom, in particular the rotational ones, and the associated symmetries. Building on these symmetries, we introduce the minimal coupling part of the point particle action in term...

A small body orbiting a black hole follows a trajectory that, at leading order, is a geodesic of the black hole spacetime. Much effort has gone into computing "self force" corrections to this motion, arising from the small body's own contributions to the system's spacetime. Another correction to the motion arises from coupling of the small body's spin to the black hole's spacetime curvature. Spin-curvature coupling drives a precession of the small body, and introduces a "forc...

We derive the third subleading (N$^3$LO) corrections of the quadratic-in-spin sectors via the EFT of spinning objects in post-Newtonian (PN) gravity. These corrections consist of contributions from $4$ sectors for generic compact binaries, that enter at the fifth PN order. One of these contributions is due to a new tidal interaction, that is unique to the sectors with spin, and complements the first tidal interaction that also enters at this PN order in the simple point-mass ...

We present a study of spinning black hole binaries focusing on the spin dynamics of the individual black holes as well as on the gravitational recoil acquired by the black hole produced by the merger. We consider two series of initial spin orientations away from the binary orbital plane. In one of the series, the spins are anti-aligned; for the second series, one of the spins points away from the binary along the line separating the black holes. We find a remarkable agreement...

We describe a systematic framework for computing the conservative potential of a compact binary system using modern tools from scattering amplitudes and effective field theory. Our approach combines methods for integration and matching adapted from effective field theory, generalized unitarity, and the double-copy construction, which relates gravity integrands to simpler gauge-theory expressions. With these methods we derive the third post-Minkowskian correction to the conser...

We develop massive higher-spin theory as a framework for describing dynamics of rotating compact objects, such as Kerr black holes. In this paper, we explore gauge interactions up to quartic order and corresponding Compton amplitudes of higher-spin massive objects coupled to electromagnetism and Yang-Mills theory. Their classical counterparts are known as root-Kerr gauge-theory solutions, whose amplitudes are closely related to those of Kerr black holes. We use three distinct...

We present a new effective-one-body (EOB) Hamiltonian with next-to-leading order (NLO) spin-spin coupling for black hole binaries endowed with arbitrarily oriented spins. The Hamiltonian is based on the model for parallel spins and equatorial orbits developed in [Physical Review D 90, 044018 (2014)], but differs from it in several ways. In particular, the NLO spin-spin coupling is not incorporated by a redefinition of the centrifugal radius $r_c$, but by separately modifying ...