Gravitational radiation reaction and inspiral waveforms in the adiabatic limit
We describe progress evolving an important limit of binary orbits in general relativity, that of a stellar mass compact object gradually spiraling into a much larger, massive black hole. These systems are of great interest for gravitational wave observations. We have developed tools to compute for the first time the radiated fluxes of energy and angular momentum, as well as instantaneous snapshot waveforms, for generic geodesic orbits. For special classes of orbits, we compute the orbital evolution and waveforms for the complete inspiral by imposing global conservation of energy and angular momentum. For fully generic orbits, inspirals and waveforms can be obtained by augmenting our approach with a prescription for the self force in the adiabatic limit derived by Mino. The resulting waveforms should be sufficiently accurate to be used in future gravitational-wave searches.