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BIMSA General Relativity Seminar
Flux-balance laws for gravitational self-force and spinning bodies
Flux-balance laws for gravitational self-force and spinning bodies
Organizers
Speaker
Alexander Grant
Time
Friday, October 10, 2025 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Venue
A3-2-301
Online
Zoom 787 662 9899
(BIMSA)
Abstract
The gravitational self-force describes the motion of bodies in general relativity, extending the usual geodesic motion by including effects due to the back-reaction by emitted gravitational waves. Since geodesics can often be determined by a set of conserved quantities, self-forced motion can be described in terms of the evolution of these conserved quantities. For conserved quantities related to isometries of the background geometry (for example, energy and angular momentum), it has long been known that their evolution can be written in terms of the flux of a conserved current through the boundaries of the spacetime. In this talk, I will show how such "flux-balance laws" apply to other conserved quantities (such as the Carter constant in the Kerr spacetime), as well as how these concepts generalize when the body is extended, and so is characterized not only by its four-momentum but also its spin.
Speaker Intro
Alexander Grant studied physics at the University of Chicago and Cornell University, obtaining his PhD under the supervision of Eanna Flanagan at the latter in 2020. From 2020 to 2023, he was a postdoctoral researcher at University of Virginia working under David Nichols on the gravitational wave memory effect, and he is currently a research fellow in the self-force group at the University of Southampton working under Adam Pound.