Late-time tails in nonlinear evolutions of merging black holes
Abstract
We uncover late-time gravitational-wave tails in fully nonlinear 3+1 dimensional numerical relativity simulations of merging black holes, using the highly accurate SpEC code. We achieve this result by exploiting the strong magnification of late-time tails due to binary eccentricity, recently observed in perturbative evolutions, and showcase here the tail presence in head-on configurations for several mass ratios close to unity. We validate the result through a large battery of numerical tests and detailed comparison with perturbative evolutions, which display striking agreement with full nonlinear ones. Our results offer yet another confirmation of the highly predictive power of black hole perturbation theory in the presence of a source, even when applied to nonlinear solutions. The late-time tail signal is much more prominent than anticipated until recently, and possibly within reach of gravitational-wave detectors measurements, unlocking observational investigations of an additional set of general relativistic predictions on the long-range gravitational dynamics.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2412.06887,
title = {Late-time tails in nonlinear evolutions of merging black holes},
author = {Marina De Amicis and Hannes Rüter and Gregorio Carullo and Simone Albanesi and C. Melize Ferrus and Keefe Mitman and Leo C. Stein and Vitor Cardoso and Sebastiano Bernuzzi and Michael Boyle and Nils Deppe and Lawrence E. Kidder and Jordan Moxon and Alessandro Nagar and Kyle C. Nelli and Harald P. Pfeiffer and Mark A. Scheel and William Throwe and Nils L. Vu and Anıl Zenginoğlu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.06887},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
5+7 pages, 2+5 figures, 1+1 tables