Related papers: PRECESSION 2.1: black-hole binary spin precession …
Recent hydrodynamical simulations have shown that circumbinary gas disks drive the orbits of binary black holes to become eccentric, even when general relativistic corrections to the orbit are significant. Here, we study the general…
In a recent paper arXiv:0709.0299, we introduced a spin expansion that provides a simple yet powerful way to understand aspects of binary black hole (BBH) merger. This approach relies on the symmetry properties of initial and final…
We compute here the spin-orbit and spin-spin couplings needed for an accurate computation of the phasing of gravitational waves emitted by comparable-mass binaries on eccentric orbits at the second post-Newtonian (PN) order. We use a…
The ringdown phase of a binary black-hole merger encodes key information about the remnant properties and provides a direct probe of the strong-field regime of General Relativity. While quasi-normal mode frequencies and damping times are…
Nearly all previous binary black hole searches in LIGO--Virgo--KAGRA (LVK) gravitational wave data have assumed that the component spins are aligned with the orbital angular momentum, thereby neglecting spin-precession effects in the…
Black hole binaries on non-eccentric orbits form an important subclass of gravitational wave sources, but it is a non-trivial issue to construct numerical initial data with minimal initial eccentricity for numerical simulations. We compute…
We present a simple method to track the precession of a black-hole-binary system, using only information from the gravitational-wave (GW) signal. Our method consists of locating the frame from which the magnitude of the $(\ell=2,|m|=2)$…
Spin precession in compact binaries is intricately tuned to the multipole structure of the underlying bodies. For black holes, violations of the no-hair theorems induced by modifications to general relativity correct the precession…
These lecture notes are based on Refs. arXiv:2110.15351, arXiv:2012.06586, and arXiv:1908.02927, which aim to give closed-form solutions to the spinning, eccentric binary black hole dynamics at 1.5PN via two different equivalent ways: (1)…
This paper studies the formation and evolution of binary supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in rotating galactic nuclei, focusing on the role of stellar dynamics. We present the first N-body simulations that follow the evolution of the SMBHs…
In general relativity, isolated black holes obey the no hair theorems, which fix the multipolar structure of their exterior spacetime. However, in modified gravity, or when the compact objects are not black holes, the exterior spacetime may…
The increasing sophistication and accuracy of numerical simulations of compact binaries (especially binary black holes) presents the opportunity to test the regime in which post-Newtonian (PN) predictions for the emitted gravitational waves…
We make a comparison between results from numerically generated, quasi-equilibrium configurations of compact binary systems of black holes in close orbits, and results from the post-Newtonian approximation. The post-Newtonian results are…
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…
We calculate the eccentricity dependence of the high-order post-Newtonian (PN) expansion of the spin-precession invariant $\psi$ for eccentric-orbit extreme-mass-ratio inspirals with a Schwarzschild primary. The series is calculated in…
The secular evolution of a spinning, massive binary system in eccentric orbit is analyzed, expanding and generalizing our previous treatments of the Lense-Thirring motion and the one-spin limit. The spin-orbit and spin-spin effects up to…
Eccentricity and spin precession are key observables in gravitational-wave astronomy, encoding precious information about the astrophysical formation of compact binaries together with fine details of the relativistic two-body problem.…
Characterizing eccentricity in gravitational waveforms in a consistent manner is crucial to facilitate parameter estimation, astrophysical population studies, as well as searches for these rare systems. We present a framework to…
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…
We study the dynamics of a pair of extremal (half-BPS) black holes in $\mathcal{N}=8$ supergravity, as a potentially solvable model of gravitational dynamics. As a diagnosis of hidden symmetries, we ask whether the perihelion of the orbits…