Self-force and fluid resonances

The gravitational self-force acting on a particle orbiting a massive central body has thus far been computed for vacuum spacetimes involving a black hole. In this work we continue an ongoing effort to study the self-force in nonvacuum situations. We replace the black hole by a material body consisting of a perfect fluid, and determine the impact of the fluid's dynamics on the self-force and resulting orbital evolution. We show that as the particle inspirals toward the fluid body, its gravitational perturbations trigger a number of quasinormal modes of the fluid-gravity system, which produce resonant features in the conservative and dissipative components of the self-force. As a proof-of-principle, we demonstrate this phenomenon in a simplified framework in which gravity is mediated by a scalar potential satisfying a wave equation in Minkowski spacetime.

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