Related papers: Toward a dynamical shift condition for unequal mas…
Gravitational-wave signals from black-hole binaries with non-precessing spins are described by four parameters -- each black hole's mass and spin. It has been shown that the dominant spin effects can be modeled by a \emph{single} spin…
Numerical codes based on a direct implementation of the standard ADM formulation of Einstein's equations have generally failed to provide long-term stable and convergent evolutions of black hole spacetimes when excision is used to remove…
Close stellar binaries are prone to undergo a phase of stable mass transfer in which a star loses mass to its companion. Assuming that the donor star loses mass along the instantaneous interstellar axis, we derive the orbit-averaged…
The discovery of frame-dragging effects in binary pulsar timing experiments requires a compact companion with sufficiently large spin. A pulsar orbiting a fast rotating black hole could provide an appropriate test system. In this paper we…
Gravitational waves from coalescing binary black holes encode the evolution of their spins prior to merger. In the post-Newtonian regime and on the precession timescale, this evolution has one of three morphologies, with the spins either…
In numerical evolutions of binary black holes (BBH) it is desirable to easily control the orbital eccentricity of the BBH, and the number of orbits completed by the binary through merger. This paper presents fitting formulae that allow to…
Binary black holes may form both through isolated binary evolution and through dynamical interactions in dense stellar environments. The formation channel leaves an imprint on the alignment between the black hole spins and the orbital…
We construct approximate analytical solutions to the constraint equations of general relativity for binary black holes of arbitrary mass ratio in quasicircular orbit. We adopt the puncture method to solve the constraint equations in the…
Activities in data analysis and numerical simulation of gravitational waves have to date largely proceeded independently. In this work we study how waveforms obtained from numerical simulations could be effectively used within the data…
In this paper, binary systems of unequal Kerr-Newman black holes located on the axis and apart by a massless strut are investigated. After adopting a fitting parametrization, the conditions on the axis and the one eliminating the individual…
Spin precession occurs in binary black holes whose spins are misaligned with the orbital angular momentum. Otherwise, the spin configuration is constant and the subsequent binary dynamics and gravitational-wave emission are much simpler. We…
Two new observational windows have been opened to strong gravitational physics: gravitational waves, and very long baseline interferometry. This suggests observational searches for new phenomena in this regime, and in particular for those…
Parameter estimation of binary-black-hole merger events in gravitational-wave data relies on matched-filtering techniques, which, in turn, depend on accurate model waveforms. Here we characterize the systematic biases introduced in…
We present a study of the gravitational waveforms from a series of spinning, equal-mass black hole binaries focusing on the harmonic content of the waves and the contribution of the individual harmonics to the signal-to-noise ratio. The…
We present the results of 74 new simulations of nonprecessing spinning black hole binaries with mass ratios $q=m_1/m_2$ in the range $1/7\leq q\leq1$ and individual spins covering the parameter space $-0.95\leq\alpha_{1,2}\leq0.95$ with one…
Environment, such as the accretion disk, could modify the signal of the gravitational wave from the astrophysical black hole binaries. In this article, we model the matter field around the intermediate-mass binary black holes by means of an…
The extensive catalog of waveforms, with details of binary black hole inspiral and merger, offer an opportunity to understand black hole interactions beyond the large separation regime. We envision a research program that focuses on the…
The putative ubiquity of massive black holes (MBH) at the center of galaxies, and the hierarchical progress of structure formation along the cosmic history, together necessarily imply the existence of a large population of cosmic MBH…
We study the nonlinear dynamics of binary black hole systems with scalar charge by numerically evolving the full equations of motion for shift-symmetric Einstein scalar Gauss-Bonnet gravity. We consider quasi-circular binaries with…
We propose a simple and unambiguous way to deduce the parameters of black holes which may reside in AGNs and some types of X-ray binaries. The black-hole mass and angular momentum are determined in physical units. The method is applicable…