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Black hole spin will have a large impact on searches for gravitational waves with advanced detectors. While only a few stellar mass black hole spins have been measured using X-ray techniques, gravitational wave detectors have the capacity…
Binary black-hole systems with spins aligned or anti-aligned to the orbital angular momentum provide the natural ground to start detailed studies of the influence of strong-field spin effects on gravitational wave observations of coalescing…
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…
Identifying weak gravitational wave signals in noise and estimating the source properties require high-precision waveform templates. Numerical relativity (NR) simulations can provide the most accurate waveforms. However, it is challenging…
A perturbed black hole emits gravitational radiation, usually termed the ringdown signal, whose frequency and time-constant depends on the mass and spin of the black hole. I investigate the case of a binary black hole merger resulting from…
Binary black hole simulations have traditionally been computationally very expensive: current simulations are performed in supercomputers involving dozens if not hundreds of processors, thus systematic studies of the parameter space of…
Merging compact black-hole (BH) binaries are likely to exist in the nuclear star clusters around supermassive BHs (SMBHs), such as Sgr A$^\ast$. They may also form in the accretion disks of active galactic nuclei. Such compact binaries can…
Numerical-relativity simulations offer a unique approach to investigating the dynamics of binary neutron star mergers and provide the most accurate predictions of waveforms in the late inspiral phase. However, the numerical predictions are…
Given the absence of observations of black hole binaries, it is critical that the full range of accessible parameter space be explored in anticipation of future observation with gravitational wave detectors. To this end, we compile the…
Newtonian simulations have demonstrated that accretion onto binary black holes produces accretion disks around each black hole ("minidisks"), fed by gas streams flowing through the circumbinary cavity from the surrounding circumbinary disk.…
The gravitational wave signature of a binary black hole (BBH) merger is dependent on its component mass and spin. If such black holes originate from rapidly rotating progenitors, the large angular momentum reserve in the star could drive a…
This paper presents techniques and results for simulations of unequal mass, non-spinning black hole binaries with pseudo-spectral methods. Specifically, we develop an efficient root-finding procedure to ensure the black hole initial data…
Next-generation gravitational-wave observatories are expected to detect over a thousand compact binary coalescence signals daily, with some lasting from minutes to hours. Consequently, multiple signals will overlap in the time-frequency…
Precision tests of general relativity can be conducted by observing binary pulsars. Theories with massive fields exist to explain a variety of phenomena from dark energy to the strong CP problem. Existing pulsar binaries, such as the white…
The third release of the RIT public catalog of numerical relativity black-hole-binary waveforms \url{http://ccrg.rit.edu/~RITCatalog} consists of 777 accurate simulations that include 300 precessing and 477 nonprecessing binary systems with…
Ultrarelativistic collisions of black holes are ideal gedanken experiments to study the nonlinearities of general relativity. In this paper we use semianalytical tools to better understand the nature of these collisions and the emitted…
Extreme mass ratio binary systems, binaries involving stellar mass objects orbiting massive black holes, are considered to be a primary source of gravitational radiation to be detected by the space-based interferometer LISA. The numerical…
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…
The coalescence of a neutron star with a black hole is a primary science target of ground-based gravitational wave detectors. Constraining or measuring the neutron star spin directly from gravitational wave observations requires knowledge…
We review current challenges in understanding the values and origin of the spins of black holes in binaries. Thanks to recent advances in astrophysical instrumentation, the spins can now be measured using both gravitational waves emitted by…