Related papers: Endpoint of the up-down instability in precessing …
We revisit the problem of predicting the spin magnitude and direction of the black hole resulting from the merger of two black holes with arbitrary masses and spins inspiralling in quasi-circular orbits. We do this by analyzing a catalog of…
The Advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors have now observed approximately 50 black-hole-binary mergers, from which we can begin to infer how rapidly astrophysical black holes spin. The LIGO-Virgo Collaboration (LVC) analysis of detections up to…
Ultralight bosons can form clouds around rotating black holes if their Compton wavelength is comparable to the black hole size. The boson cloud spins down the black hole through a process called superradiance, lowering the black hole spin…
In dynamically formed binaries, the spins of the black holes tend to be misaligned with the system's orbital angular momentum. This causes the spins to precess and leads to an asymmetric emission of gravitational waves. The resulting…
The first direct detections of gravitational waves from merging binary black holes open a unique window into the binary black hole formation environment. One promising environmental signature is the angular distribution of the black hole…
Current searches for compact binary mergers by ground-based gravitational-wave detectors assume for simplicity the two bodies are not spinning. If the binary contains compact objects with significant spin, then this can reduce the…
We study the evolution of black hole collisions and ultraspinning black hole instabilities in higher dimensions. These processes can be efficiently solved numerically in an effective theory in the limit of large number of dimensions D. We…
A massive spin-2 field can grow unstably around a black hole, giving rise to a potential probe of the existence of such fields. In this work, we use time-domain evolutions to study such instabilities. Considering the linear regime by…
Black-hole (BH) binary mergers driven by gravitational perturbations of tertiary companions constitute an important class of dynamical formation channels for compact binaries detected by LIGO/VIRGO. Recent works have examined numerically…
There are at least two formation scenarios consistent with the first gravitational-wave observations of binary black hole mergers. In field models, black hole binaries are formed from stellar binaries that may undergo common envelope…
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…
After eleven gravitational-wave detections from compact-binary mergers, we are yet to observe the striking general-relativistic phenomenon of orbital precession. Measurements of precession would provide valuable insights into the…
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…
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…
We reanalyse the LIGO-Virgo strain data of the 10 binary black hole mergers reported to date and compute the likelihood function in terms of chirp mass, mass ratio and effective spin. We discuss the strong degeneracy between mass ratio and…
Binary black hole spins are among the key observables for gravitational wave astronomy. Among the spin parameters, their orientations within the orbital plane, $\phi_1$, $\phi_2$ and $\Delta \phi=\phi_1-\phi_2$, are critical for…
We analyze in detail the spin precession equations in binary black hole systems, when the tidal torque on a Kerr black hole due to quadrupole-monopole coupling is taken into account. We show that completing the precession equations with…
Various higher-dimensional black holes have been shown to be unstable by studying linearized gravitational perturbations. A simpler method for demonstrating instability is to find initial data that describes a small perturbation of the…
Gravitational-wave observations provide the unique opportunity of studying black hole formation channels and histories -- but only if we can identify their origin. One such formation mechanism is the dynamical synthesis of black hole…
The degree of black-hole spin-orbit misalignment ("tilts") in the astrophysical population could be a powerful diagnostic to distinguish between binary formation in isolation, in dynamical environments, or in hierarchical triples. However,…