Second-order gravitational self-force

The second-order gravitational self-force on a small body is an important problem for gravitational-wave astronomy of extreme mass-ratio inspirals. We give a first-principles derivation of a prescription for computing the first and second perturbed metric and motion of a small body moving through a vacuum background spacetime. The procedure involves solving for a “regular field” with a specified (sufficiently smooth) “effective source”, and may be applied in any gauge that produces a sufficiently smooth regular field.