15th Capra Meeting on Radiation Reaction in General Relativity

Numerical calculation of Green functions in black hole spacetimes

Anil Zenginoglu

California Institute of Technology
[SLIDES]

I will present results from recent work with Chad Galley on the numerical approximation of Green functions for scalar fields in Schwarzschild and Kerr spacetimes via evolution of narrow Gaussian packages. The trapping of energy near the horizon and its leakage leads to a rich phenomenology including intensity amplification at caustics, and a four-fold structure of caustic echoes due to Hilbert transforms. Accurate numerical computations of Green functions may provide an alternative approach to the self-force problem.