Abstract
The equations of the linearized first post-Newtonian approximation to general relativity are often written in “gravitoelectromagnetic” Maxwell-like form, since that facilitates physical intuition. Damour, Soffel, and Xu (DSX) (as a side issue in their complex but elegant papers on relativistic celestial mechanics) have expressed the first post-Newtonian approximation, including all nonlinearities, in Maxwell-like form. This paper summarizes that DSX Maxwell-like formalism (which is not easily extracted from their celestial mechanics papers), and then extends it to include the post-Newtonian (Landau-Lifshitz-based) gravitational momentum density, momentum flux (i.e. gravitational stress tensor), and law of momentum conservation in Maxwell-like form. The authors and their colleagues have found these Maxwell-like momentum tools useful for developing physical intuition into numerical-relativity simulations of compact binaries with spin.
- Received 18 August 2008
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.80.124014
©2009 American Physical Society