English

A new gravitational wave generation algorithm for particle perturbations of the Kerr spacetime

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2014-11-26 v2

Abstract

We present a new approach to solve the 2+1 Teukolsky equation for gravitational perturbations of a Kerr black hole. Our approach relies on a new horizon penetrating, hyperboloidal foliation of Kerr spacetime and spatial compactification. In particular, we present a framework for waveform generation from point-particle perturbations. Extensive tests of a time domain implementation in the code {\it Teukode} are presented. The code can efficiently deliver waveforms at future null infinity. As a first application of the method, we compute the gravitational waveforms from inspiraling and coalescing black-hole binaries in the large-mass-ratio limit. The smaller mass black hole is modeled as a point particle whose dynamics is driven by an effective-one-body-resummed analytical radiation reaction force. We compare the analytical angular momentum loss to the gravitational wave angular momentum flux. We find that higher-order post-Newtonian corrections are needed to improve the consistency for rapidly spinning binaries. Close to merger, the subdominant multipolar amplitudes (notably the m=0m=0 ones) are enhanced for retrograde orbits with respect to prograde ones. We argue that this effect mirrors nonnegligible deviations from circularity of the dynamics during the late-plunge and merger phase. We compute the gravitational wave energy flux flowing into the black hole during the inspiral using a time-domain formalism proposed by Poisson. Finally, a self-consistent, iterative method to compute the gravitational wave fluxes at leading-order in the mass of the particle is presented. For a specific case study with a^\hat{a}=0.9, a simulation that uses the consistent flux differs from one that uses the analytical flux by 35\sim35 gravitational wave cycles over a total of about 250250 cycles. In this case the horizon absorption accounts for about +5+5 gravitational wave cycles.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1406.5983,
  title  = {A new gravitational wave generation algorithm for particle perturbations of the Kerr spacetime},
  author = {Enno Harms and Sebastiano Bernuzzi and Alessandro Nagar and Anil Zenginoglu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1406.5983},
  year   = {2014}
}