Related papers: A new mechanism for massive binary black hole evol…
The dynamical processes involving stellar-remnant black holes (BH) in stellar clusters has always drawn attention due to the BHs' potential in a number of astrophysical phenomena, especially the dynamical formation of binary black holes…
We have investigated, both analytically and numerically, accreting supermassive black hole binaries as they inspiral due to gravitational radiation to elucidate the decoupling of binaries from their disks and inform future multi-messenger…
The growth of a supermassive black hole (BH) is determined by how much gas the host galaxy is able to feed it, which in turn is controlled by the cosmic environment, through galaxy mergers and accretion of cosmic flows that time how…
When two galaxies merge, they often produce a supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB) at their center. Numerical simulations with stars and cold dark matter show that SMBHBs typically stall out at a distance of a few parsecs apart and take…
Binary black holes (BBHs) born from the evolution of Population III (Pop. III) stars are one of the main high-redshift targets for next-generation ground-based gravitational-wave (GW) detectors. Their predicted initial mass function and…
The theory for single stellar evolution predicts a gap in the mass distribution of black holes (BHs) between approximately 45-130M$_{\odot}$, the so-called "pair-instability mass gap". We examine whether BHs can pollute the gap after…
Accreting supermassive binary black holes (SMBBHs) are potential targets for multi-messenger astronomy as they emit gravitational waves (GW) while their environment emits electromagnetic (EM) waves. In order to get the most out of a joint…
Massive black hole binaries (MBHBs) form as a consequence of galaxy mergers. However, it is still unclear whether they typically merge within a Hubble time, and how accretion may affect their evolution. These questions will be addressed by…
I investigate the roles of cluster dynamics and massive binary evolution in producing stellar-remnant binary black hole (BBH) mergers over the cosmic time. To that end, dynamical BBH mergers are obtained from long-term direct N-body…
A large fraction of galactic nuclei is expected to host supermassive black hole binaries (BHB), likely formed during the early phase of galaxies assembly and merging. In this paper, we use a large set of state-of-art numerical models to…
In spherical galaxies, binary supermassive black holes (SMBHs) have difficulty reaching sub-parsec separations due to depletion of stars on orbits that intersect the massive binary - the final-parsec problem. Galaxies that form via major…
Stellar-mass binary black holes (BBHs) embedded in active galactic nucleus (AGN) discs offer a distinct dynamical channel to produce black hole mergers detected in gravitational waves by LIGO/Virgo. To understand their orbital evolution…
Using few-body simulations, we investigate the evolution of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in galaxies ($M_{\star}=10^{10}-10^{12}{\rm M}_{\odot}$ at $z=0$) at $0<z<4$. Following galaxy merger trees from the Millennium simulation, we…
We describe recent numerical simulations of the merger of a class of equal mass, non-spinning, eccentric binary black hole systems in general relativity. We show that with appropriate fine-tuning of the initial conditions to a region of…
LIGO/Virgo has detected several binary black hole (BBH) merger events that may have originated in the accretion disks of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). These events require individual black hole masses that fall within the pair instability…
Observations by JWST have confirmed the presence of supermassive black holes (BHs) at redshifts $z\gtrsim10$, lending support to scenarios in which BHs experience rapid growth through intense gas accretion. Here we investigate the growth of…
Binary-black-hole (BBH) mergers can take place close to a supermassive black hole (SMBH) while being in a bound orbit around the SMBH. In this paper, we study such bound triple systems and show that including the strong gravity effects of…
This is the second paper in a series aimed at modeling the black hole (BH) mass function, from the stellar to the (super)massive regime. In the present work we focus on (super)massive BHs and provide an ab-initio computation of their mass…
At about 70 solar masses, the recently-discovered dark object orbited by a B-type star in the system LB-1 is difficult to understand as the end point of standard stellar evolution, except as a binary black hole (BBH). LB-1 shows a strong,…
Studying the formation and evolution of black hole binaries (BHBs) is essential for the interpretation of current and forthcoming gravitational wave (GW) detections. We investigate the statistics of BHBs that form from isolated binaries, by…