Periastron advance from the perturbed Binet equation

Abstract: We apply the Poincaré-Lindstedt method to the perturbed Binet equation describing conservative dynamics of the perturbed Kepler problem. We show that a simple treatment of divergent terms directly determines the frequency shift of the radial motion and hence the periastron advance. We provide explicit expressions for polynomial, logarithmic and inverse power perturbations, extend the procedure to higher perturbative orders and to problems involving several perturbation parameters. Applying this method to different physical effects relevant to compact binaries, we recover known results. We also obtain new contributions to the periastron advance, including the leading-order effects of arbitrary mass- and current-type tidal multipoles and mass-type spin-induced multipoles, the NNLO current-type tidal quadrupole contribution, electromagnetic electric-dipole contributions to NNLO and the eccentric corrections to the electric charge. Finally, we illustrate how the method can be directly applied to the problem of particle motion in Reissner-Nordström, de Sitter-Schwarzschild metrics and in a Yukawa potential.