Related papers: A catalogue of precessing black-hole-binary numeri…
We present and assess a Bayesian method to interpret gravitational wave signals from binary black holes. Our method directly compares gravitational wave data to numerical relativity simulations. This procedure bypasses approximations used…
Motivated by the possibility of observing gravitational waves from merging black holes whose spins are nearly extremal (i.e., 1 in dimensionless units), we present numerical waveforms from simulations of merging black holes with the highest…
The astrophysical formation channels of binary black hole systems predict correlations between their mass, spin, and redshift distributions, which can be probed with gravitational-wave observations. Population-level analysis of the latest…
The spins of black holes in merging binaries can reveal information related to the formation and evolution of these systems through their gravitational wave emission. Combining events to infer the astrophysical distribution of black hole…
We perform a statistical analysis of the binary black hole problem in the post-Newtonian approximation by systematically sampling and evolving the parameter space of initial configurations for quasi-circular inspirals. Through a principal…
We present results from fully nonlinear simulations of unequal mass binary black holes plunging from close separations well inside the innermost stable circular orbit with mass ratios q = M_1/M_2 = {1,0.85,0.78,0.55,0.32}, or equivalently,…
Observations of gravitational waves from massive binary black hole systems at cosmological distances can be used to search for a dependence of the speed of propagation of the waves on wavelength, and thereby to bound the mass of a…
Knowledge of the spin of the black hole resulting from the merger of a generic black-hole binary is of great importance for studying the cosmological evolution of supermassive black holes. Several attempts have been made to model the spin…
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…
While supermassive binary black holes inspiral toward merger they may also experience significant accretion of matter from a surrounding disk. We study the dynamics of this system, simultaneously describing the evolving spacetime and…
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…
We evolve a binary black hole system bearing a mass ratio of $q=m_1/m_2=2/3$ and individual spins of $S^z_1/m_1^2=0.95$ and $S^z_2/m_2^2=-0.95$ in a configuration where the large black hole has its spin antialigned with the orbital angular…
Gravitational-wave signals from compact binary coalescences are most efficiently identified through matched filter searches, which match the data against a pre-generated bank of gravitational-wave templates. Although different techniques…
We present gravitational waveforms for the last orbits and merger of black-hole-binary (BBH) systems along two branches of the BBH parameter space: equal-mass binaries with equal non-precessing spins, and nonspinning unequal-mass binaries.…
We update the analytical estimate of the final spin of a coalescing black-hole binary derived within the Effective-One-Body (EOB) approach. We consider unequal-mass non-spinning black-hole binaries. It is found that a more complete account…
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,…
In this paper, we compare the waveforms from the post-Newtonian (PN) approach with the numerical simulations of generic black-hole binaries which have mass ratio $q\sim0.8$, arbitrarily oriented spins with magnitudes $S_1/m_1^2\sim0.6$ and…
We revisit the scenario of small-mass-ratio (q) black-hole binaries; performing new, more accurate, simulations of mass ratios 10:1 and 100:1 for initially nonspinning black holes. We propose fitting functions for the trajectories of the…
We use the `moving puncture' approach to perform fully non-linear evolutions of spinning quasi-circular black-hole binaries with individual spins not aligned with the orbital angular momentum. We evolve configurations with the individual…
An approximate solution to Einstein's equations representing two widely-separated non-rotating black holes in a circular orbit is constructed by matching a post-Newtonian metric to two perturbed Schwarzschild metrics. The spacetime metric…