Since the inaugural meeting in 1998 (held at Caltech’s Capra Ranch near San Diego) the Capra meetings have been bringing together relativists interested in the problem of radiation reaction in general relativity and its application to extreme-mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs) as astrophysical sources of gravitational waves. The meetings address an important open problem in gravitational theory, made particularly relevant by the recent LIGO and Virgo detections of merging black holes and neutron stars, and the exciting prospect of directly observing gravitational waves from EMRIs with the future space-based detector, LISA.

The 21st Capra Meeting on Radiation Reaction in General Relativity will be hosted by the Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity division of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, also known as the Albert Einstein Institute. The meeting will be held June 25-29, 2018.

As usual, the program will focus on aspects of the self-force in general relativity but will also seek to explore connections to other approaches to the two-body problem. Following the Capra tradition, the meeting will be informal. There will be no registration fee and no proceedings. The program will include a few invited review talks, short contributed presentations, and open discussions. Contributed talks on all aspects of the radiation reaction problem (including related topics such as EMRI astrophysics or data analysis) are welcome.

Invited Speakers:

  • Stanislav Babak (APC Paris)
  • Enrico Barausse (IAP)
  • Karsten Danzmann (AEI Hannover)
  • Ian Harry (AEI Potsdam)
  • Seth Hopper (Earlham College)
  • Chris Kavanagh (IHES Paris)
  • Cole Miller (University of Maryland)
  • Jordan Moxon (Cornell)
  • Adam Pound (University of Southampton)
  • Barry Wardell (UCD Dublin)