Related papers: Puncture Initial Data for Black-Hole Binaries with…
Standard puncture initial data have been widely used for numerical binary black hole evolutions despite their shortcomings, most notably the inherent lack of gravitational radiation at the initial time that is later followed by a burst of…
We study the collision of two slowly rotating, initially non boosted, black holes in the close limit. A ``punctures'' modification of the Bowen - York method is used to construct conformally flat initial data appropriate to the problem. We…
Approximate solutions to the Einstein field equations are a valuable tool to investigate gravitational phenomena. An important aspect of any approximation is to investigate and quantify its regime of validity. We present a study that…
We present improved post-Newtonian-inspired initial data for non-spinning black-hole binaries, suitable for numerical evolution with punctures. We revisit the work of Tichy et al. [W. Tichy, B. Bruegmann, M. Campanelli, and P. Diener, Phys.…
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…
There is a significant possibility that astrophysical black holes with nearly-extremal spins exist. Numerical simulations of such systems require suitable initial data. In this paper, we examine three methods of constructing…
We demonstrate that numerical relativity codes based on the moving punctures formalism are capable of evolving nearly maximally spinning black hole binaries. We compare a new evolution of an equal-mass, aligned-spin binary with…
When two relativistically boosted, nonspinning black holes pass by one another on a scattering trajectory, we might expect the tidal interaction to spin up each black hole. We present the first exploration of this effect, appearing at…
Traditional black-hole binary puncture initial data is conformally flat. This unphysical assumption is coupled with a lack of radiation signature from the binary's past life. As a result, waveforms extracted from evolutions of this data…
We follow the inspiral and merger of equal-mass black holes (BHs) by the moving puncture technique and demonstrate that both the exterior solution and the asymptotic gravitational waveforms are unchanged when the initial interior solution…
High-accuracy binary black hole simulations are presented for black holes with spins anti-aligned with the orbital angular momentum. The particular case studied represents an equal-mass binary with spins of equal magnitude S/m^2=0.43757 \pm…
We present approximate analytical solutions to the Hamiltonian and momentum constraint equations, corresponding to systems composed of two black holes with arbitrary linear and angular momentum. The analytical nature of these initial data…
Sequences of initial-data sets representing binary black holes in quasi-circular orbits have been used to calculate what may be interpreted as the innermost stable circular orbit. These sequences have been computed with two approaches. One…
We propose a new radial coordinate to write the Kerr metric in puncture form. Unlike the quasi-radial coordinate introduced previously, the horizon radius remains finite in our radial coordinate in the extreme Kerr limit a/M -> 1. This…
The starting point of any general relativistic numerical simulation is a solution of the Hamiltonian and momentum constraints that (ideally) represents an astrophysically realistic scenario. We present a new method to produce initial data…
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 perform numerical simulations of black-hole binaries to study the exchange of spin and orbital angular momentum during the last, highly nonlinear, stages of the coalescence process. To calculate the transfer of angular momentum from…
We obtain an explicit solution of the momentum constraint for conformally flat, maximal slicing, initial data which gives an alternative to the purely longitudinal extrinsic curvature of Bowen and York. The new solution is related, in a…
We study conformally-flat initial data for an arbitrary number of spinning black holes with exact analytic solutions to the momentum constraints constructed from a linear combination of the classical Bowen-York and conformal Kerr extrinsic…
As a first step towards understanding the angular momentum evolution history of black holes in merging black-hole/neutron-star binaries, we perform population synthesis calculations to track the distribution of accretion histories of…