Abstract. The late stage of the inspiral of two black holes may have important non-Newtonian effects that are unrelated to radiation reaction. To understand these effects we approximate a slowly inspiralling binary by a stationary solution to Einstein's equations in which the holes orbit eternally. Radiation reaction is nullified by specifying a boundary condition at infinity containing equal amounts of ingoing and outgoing radiation. The computational problem is then converted from an evolution problem with initial data to a boundary value problem. In addition to providing an approximate inspiral waveform via extraction of the outgoing modes, our approximation can give alternative initial data for numerical relativity evolution. We report results on simplified models and on progress in building 3D numerical solutions.

PACS numbers: 0425D, 0430D, 0470B

Print publication: Issue 7 (7 April 2002)
Received 2 October 2001, in final form 11 December 2001
Published 11 March 2002