Related papers: Superradiant clouds may be relevant for close comp…
Modeling the late inspiral and merger of supermassive black holes is central to understanding accretion processes and the conditions under which electromagnetic emission accompanies gravitational waves. We use fully general relativistic,…
Massive central objects affect both the structure and evolution of galactic nuclei. Adiabatic growth of black holes generates power-law central density profiles with logarithmic slopes in the range from ~1.5 to ~2.5, in good agreement with…
Several models of physics beyond the Standard Model predict the existence of new ultralight bosons. This thesis investigates a way to discover such particles through observations of gravitational waves from binary black holes. This is…
Rapid binary population synthesis codes are often used to investigate the evolution of compact-object binaries. They typically rely on analytical fits of single-star evolutionary tracks and parameterized models for interactive phases of…
When galaxies collide, dynamical friction drives their central supermassive black holes close enought to each other such that gravitational radiation becomes the leading dissipative effect. Gravitational radiation takes away energy,…
Oscillating clouds of ultralight bosons can grow around spinning black holes through superradiance, extracting energy and angular momentum, and eventually dissipating through gravitational radiation. Gravitational wave detectors like LIGO,…
[ABRIDGED] We study supermassive black hole binary mergers driven by angular momentum loss to small-scale gas discs. Such binaries form after major galaxy mergers, but their fate is unclear since hardening through stellar scattering becomes…
We study whether binary black hole template banks can be used to search for the gravitational waves emitted by general binary coalescences. To recover binary signals from noisy data, matched-filtering techniques are typically required. This…
The formation of massive black hole binaries (MBHBs) is an unavoidable outcome of galaxy evolution via successive mergers. However, the mechanism that drives their orbital evolution from parsec separations down to the gravitational wave…
We investigated the evolution of the black hole binary formed by the merging of two galaxies each containing a central massive black hole. Our main goal here is to determine if the black hole binary can merge through the hardening by…
Recent gravitational wave observations include possible detections of black hole - neutron star binary mergers. As with binary black hole mergers, numerical simulations help characterize the sources. For binary systems with neutron star…
Ultralight bosons can condense to form the so-called bosonic clouds around spinning black holes by superradiance instability. When quantum effects are taken into account, the classical black holes were replaced by exotic compact objects…
Binary systems of massive black holes will be detectable by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) throughout the entire Universe. Observations of gravitational waves from this class of sources will have important repercussions on…
I present evidence of a novel guise of superradiance that arises in black hole binary spacetimes. Given the right initial conditions, a wave will be amplified as it scatters off the binary. This process, which extracts energy from the…
Current simulations of the rate at which stellar-mass compact objects merge with supermassive black holes (called extreme mass ratio inspirals, or EMRIs) focus on two-body capture by emission of gravitational radiation. The gravitational…
With hydrodynamical simulations we examine the evolution of a highly misaligned circumbinary disc around a black hole binary including the effects of general relativity. We show that a disc mass of just a few percent of the binary mass can…
We explore the possible spectrum of binary mergers of sub-solar mass black holes formed out of dark matter particles interacting via a dark electromagnetism. We estimate the properties of these dark black holes by assuming that their…
Measurements of the spin of stellar mass black holes (BHs) are now possible both through LIGO observations of binary BH mergers and for BHs in X-ray binary systems. The spins of BHs as inferred from LIGO observations suggest that BH spins…
Superradiant instabilities may create clouds of ultralight bosons around rotating black holes, forming so-called "gravitational atoms." It was recently shown that the presence of a binary companion can induce resonant transitions between…
Coalescing massive black hole binaries are powerful emitters of gravitational waves, in the LISA sensitivity range for masses M_BH ~ 10^{4-7} M_sun. According to hierarchical galaxy merger models, binary black holes should form frequently,…