Related papers: Reducing orbital eccentricity of precessing black-…
Very large mass ratio binary black hole systems are of interest both as a clean limit of the two-body problem in general relativity, as well as for their importance as sources of low-frequency gravitational waves. At lowest order, the…
We present a new approach to studying the evolution of massive black hole binaries in a stellar environment. By imposing conservation of total energy and angular momentum in scattering experiments, we find the dissipation forces that are…
Interactions between a supermassive black hole binary and the surrounding accretion disc can both assist the binary inspiral and align the black hole spins to the disc angular momentum. While binary migration is due to angular-momentum…
We present new numerical-relativity simulations of eccentric merging black holes with initially antiparallel spins lying in the orbital plane (the so-called \emph{superkick} configuration). Binary eccentricity boosts the recoil of the…
The development of eccentric waveform models enables us to explore the growing catalog of gravitational-wave events with measurable eccentricity. This opens new opportunities to gain insight into the formation channels and evolutionary…
Tidal torques acting on a gaseous accretion disk around a binary black hole can create a gap in the disk near the orbital radius. At late times, when the binary inspiral timescale due to gravitational wave emission becomes shorter than the…
We study the dynamics of a binary system orbiting a rotating supermassive black hole (SMBH). Using Fermi-Walker transport, we construct a local inertial reference frame in the Kerr spacetime and set up a Newtonian binary system. Assuming…
The orbital eccentricity of a merging binary black hole leaves an imprint on the associated gravitational-wave signal that can reveal whether the binary formed in isolation or in a dynamical environment, such as the core of a dense star…
We study the spin and eccentricity evolution of black-hole (BH) binaries that are perturbed by tertiary masses and experience the Lidov-Kozai (LK) excitation. We focus on three aspects. Firstly, we study the spin-orbit alignment of the…
Using recent results from numerical relativity simulations of black hole mergers, we revisit previous studies of cosmological black hole spin evolution. We show that mergers are very unlikely to yield large spins, unless alignment of the…
We investigate the detectability of sub-dominant spin effects in merging black-hole binaries using current gravitational-wave data. Using a phenomenological model that separates the spin dynamics into precession (azimuthal motion) and…
Gravitational waveforms capturing binary evolution through the early-inspiral phase play a critical role in extracting orbital features that nearly disappear during the late-inspiral and subsequent merger phase due to radiation reaction…
We perform the first fully nonlinear numerical simulations of black-hole binaries with mass ratios 100:1. Our technique for evolving such extreme mass ratios is based on the moving puncture approach with a new gauge condition and an optimal…
Relativistic spin-orbit and spin-spin couplings has been shown to modify the gravitational waveforms expected from inspiraling binaries with a black hole and a neutron star. As a result inspiral signals may be missed due to significant…
As 2 black holes bound to each other in a close binary approach merger their inspiral time becomes shorter than the characteristic inflow time of surrounding orbiting matter. Using an innovative technique in which we represent the changing…
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…
We perform high-resolution, grid-based hydrodynamics simulations of gaseous rings viscously spreading into disks around equal-mass, circular binaries. We find that all systems suppress accretion onto the binary when the gas is relatively…
We studied how eccentricity affects the gravitational wave (GW) spectrum from supermassive black hole (SMBH) binaries. We developed a fast and accurate semi-analytic method for computing the GW spectra, the distribution for the spectral…
Accurate inclusion of both spin precession and orbital eccentricity effects in gravitational waveform models represents a key hurdle in our ability to fully characterize the properties of compact binaries. Virtually all efforts to model…
To fully unlock the scientific potential of upcoming gravitational wave (GW) interferometers, numerical relativity (NR) simulation accuracy will need to be greatly enhanced. We present three infrastructure-agnostic improvements to the…