Effective Field Theory Methods to Model Compact Binaries

Abstract

The gravitational two-body problem is currently subject of intense investigations, under compelling phenomenological and theoretical motivations. The gravitational wave detections from compact binary coalescences will demand even more accurate description of the source dynamics as the sensitivity of detectors increases over years. The analytic modeling of classical gravitational dynamics has been enriched over the last decade of powerful methods borrowed from field theory originally developed to describe fundamental particle quantum scatterings. This work aims at presenting a review of a specific effort, initiated by the seminal paper by Goldberger and Rothstein, dubbed nonrelativistic general relativity, which applies effective field theory methods to describe the two-body dynamics in general relativity. It models the classical interaction between astrophysically massive objects via field theory methods, showing that many features usually associated with quantum field theory, e.g., divergences and counter-terms, renormalization group, loop expansions, and Feynman diagrams, have all to do with field theory, be it quantum or classical.