Date of Award
1-1-2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D. in Physics
First Advisor
Leo C. Stein
Second Advisor
Luca Bombelli
Third Advisor
Anuradha Gupta
School
University of Mississippi
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
I develop a software package to produce and analyze tidally perturbed geodesics in a Kerr background spacetime. Though my simulations do not include radiation reaction, they are a good proxy for Extreme Mass-Ratio Inspirals (EMRI) in a perturbing environment. The goal of this work is to categorize cases in which perturbations are likely to bias Gravity Wave (GW) signals detected by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) strongly enough to require additional modeling. I limit my investigation to static perturbation fields. I perform metric reconstruction in the Geroch-Held-Penrose (GHP) formalism followed by a novel approach to the derivation of the first-order corrections to the Christoffel symbols. This approach gives analytical expressions for the equations of motion avoiding the necessity of numerical derivatives. Unfortunately, trajectories produced by our integrator exhibit nonphysical behavior, likely due to an unknown error in our derivations.
Recommended Citation
Rivest, L. Joseph, "Tidal Perturbations of Kerr Spacetime and Their Impact on Orbits" (2024). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2973.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/2973