Related papers: Dynamical shift condition for unequal mass black h…
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…
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…
The gravitational waves emitted by a perturbed black hole ringing down are well described by damped sinusoids, whose frequencies are those of quasinormal modes. Typically, first-order black hole perturbation theory is used to calculate…
We study black-hole binaries in the intermediate-mass-ratio regime 0.01 < q < 0.1 with a new technique that makes use of nonlinear numerical trajectories and efficient perturbative evolutions to compute waveforms at large radii for the…
We discuss the transition from quasi-circular inspiral to plunge of a system of two nonrotating black holes of masses $m_1$ and $m_2$ in the extreme mass ratio limit $m_1m_2\ll (m_1+m_2)^2$. In the spirit of the Effective One Body (EOB)…
The first spectral numerical simulations of 16 orbits, merger, and ringdown of an equal-mass non-spinning binary black hole system are presented. Gravitational waveforms from these simulations have accumulated numerical phase errors through…
The majority of the ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) in external galaxies are believed to be accreting black holes in binary systems; some of the black holes could be as massive as $\sim 100-1000 \ms$. We have performed evolution…
The detection of gravitational waves from binary black holes sources has opened the possibility to search for electric charges and "dark" charges on black holes, the latter being candidates for dark matter. This requires theoretical…
Recent studies of accretion onto supermassive black hole binaries suggest that much, perhaps most, of the matter eventually accretes onto one hole or the other. If so, then for binaries whose inspiral from ~1 pc to 0.001 - 0.01 pc is driven…
The dynamical evolution of binaries of intermediate-massive black holes (IMBHs, massive black holes with a mass ranging between $10^2$ and $10^4 M_{\odot}$) in stellar clusters has recently received an increasing amount of attention. This…
We discuss a new N-body simulation method for studying black hole binary dynamics. This method avoids previous numerical problems due to large mass ratios and trapped orbits with short periods. A treatment of relativistic effects is…
Black hole - neutron star $(BH/NS)$ binaries are of interest in many ways: they are intrinsically multi-messenger systems, highly transient, radiate gravitational waves detectable by LIGO, and may produce $\gamma$-ray bursts. Although it…
Black hole mass is a key factor in determining how a black hole interacts with its environment. However, the determination of black hole masses at high redshifts depends on secondary mass estimators, which are based on empirical…
Numerical relativity is an essential tool in studying the coalescence of binary black holes (BBHs). It is still computationally prohibitive to cover the BBH parameter space exhaustively, making phenomenological fitting formulas for BBH…
We present three-dimensional local hydrodynamic simulations of flows around objects embedded within stellar envelopes using a "wind tunnel" formalism. Our simulations model the common envelope dynamical inspiral phase in binary star systems…
The accretion of dark matter (DM) into astrophysical black holes slowly increases their mass. The rate of this mass accretion depends on the DM model and the model parameters. If this mass accretion effect can be measured accurately enough,…
The spectral amplitude of the merger-ringdown gravitational wave (GW) emitted by a comparable mass-ratio black hole merger is modeled by the greybody factor of the remnant black hole. We also include the post-Newtonian correction to the…
The theory of superfluid dark matter is characterized by self-interacting sub-eV particles that thermalize and condense to form a superfluid core in galaxies. Massive black holes at the center of galaxies, however, modify the dark matter…
Theories of dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking predict a strong first order cosmological phase transition: we compute the resulting signals, primordial black holes and gravitational waves. These theories employ one SM-neutral scalar,…
Gravitational wave-forms from coalescences of binary black hole systems and binary neutron star systems with low tidal effects can hardly be distinguished if the two systems have similar masses. In the absence of discriminating power based…