Gravitational Self Force in a Schwarzschild Background and the Effective One Body Formalism

Abstract: We discuss various ways in which the computation of conservative Gravitational Self Force (GSF) effects on a point mass moving in a Schwarzschild background can inform us about the basic building blocks of the Effective One-Body (EOB) Hamiltonian. We display the information which can be extracted from the recently published GSF calculation of the first-GSF-order shift of the orbital frequency of the last stable circular orbit, and we combine this information with the one recently obtained by comparing the EOB formalism to high-accuracy numerical relativity (NR) data on coalescing binary black holes. The information coming from GSF data helps to break the degeneracy (among some EOB parameters) which was left after using comparable-mass NR data to constrain the EOB formalism. We suggest various ways of obtaining more information from GSF computations: either by studying eccentric orbits, or by focussing on a special zero-binding zoom-whirl orbit. We show that logarithmic terms start entering the post-Newtonian expansions of various (EOB and GSF) functions at the fourth post-Newtonian (4PN) level, and we analytically compute the first logarithm entering a certain, gauge-invariant "redshift" GSF function (defined along the sequence of circular orbits).