Dijs de Neeling

The recent detection of gravitational waves emanating from inspiralling black hole binaries has triggered a renewed interest in the dynamics of relativistic two-body systems. The conservative part of the latter are given by Hamiltonian systems obtained from so-called post- Newtonian expansions of the general relativistic description of black hole binaries. In this paper we study the general question of whether there exist relativistic binaries that display Keplerlike dynamics with elliptical orbits. We show that an orbital equivalence to the Kepler problem indeed exists for relativistic systems with a Hamiltonian of a Kepler-like form. This form is realised by extremal black holes with electric charge and scalar hair to at least first order in the post-Newtonian expansion for arbitrary mass ratios and to all orders in the post-Newtonian expansion in the test-mass limit of the binary. Moreover, to fifth post-Newtonian order, we show that Hamiltonians of the Kepler-like form can be related explicitly through a canonical transformation and time reparametrisation to the Kepler problem, and that all Hamiltonians conserving a Laplace – Runge – Lenz-like vector are related in this way to Kepler.