Related papers: Spin Flips and Precession in Black-Hole-Binary Mer…
We study the spin dynamics of individual black holes in a binary system. In particular we focus on the polar precession of spins and the possibility of a complete flip of spins with respect to the orbital plane. We perform a full numerical…
We study binary spinning black holes to display the long term individual spin dynamics. We perform a full numerical simulation starting at an initial proper separation of $d\approx25M$ between equal mass holes and evolve them down to merger…
We perform numerical simulations of black-hole binaries to study the exchange of spin and orbital angular momentum during the last, highly nonlinear, stages of the coalescence process. To calculate the transfer of angular momentum from…
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…
We report the first results from evolutions of a generic black-hole binary, i.e. a binary containing unequal mass black holes with misaligned spins. Our configuration, which has a mass ratio of 2:1, consists of an initially non-spinning…
Astrophysically realistic black holes may have spins that are nearly extremal (i.e., close to 1 in dimensionless units). Numerical simulations of binary black holes are important tools both for calibrating analytical templates for…
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…
The inspiral of binary black holes is governed by gravitational radiation reaction at binary separations r < 1000 M, yet it is too computationally expensive to begin numerical-relativity simulations with initial separations r > 10 M.…
We present a study of spinning black hole binaries focusing on the spin dynamics of the individual black holes as well as on the gravitational recoil acquired by the black hole produced by the merger. We consider two series of initial spin…
We have used our new technique for fully numerical evolutions of orbiting black-hole binaries without excision to model the last orbit and merger of an equal-mass black-hole system. We track the trajectories of the individual apparent…
We perform a set of 38 numerical simulations of equal-mass BH binaries in a configuration where the BH spins in the binary are equal in both magnitude and direction, to study precession effects. We vary the initial direction of the total…
We present the results of 14 simulations of nonspinning black hole binaries with mass ratios $q=m_1/m_2$ in the range $1/100\leq q\leq1$. For each of these simulations we perform three runs at increasing resolution to assess the finite…
We present the first fully-nonlinear numerical study of the dynamics of highly spinning black-hole binaries. We evolve binaries from quasicircular orbits (as inferred from Post-Newtonian theory), and find that the last stages of the orbital…
We study the statistical distributions of the spins of generic black-hole binaries during the inspiral and merger, as well as the distributions of the remnant mass, spin, and recoil velocity. For the inspiral regime, we start with a random…
We present the results of 61 new simulations of nonprecessing spinning black hole binaries with mass ratios $q=m_1/m_2$ in the range $1/3\leq q\leq1$ and individual spins covering the parameter space $-0.85\leq\alpha_{1,2}\leq0.85$. We…
In this work, we use general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics simulations to explore the effect of spin orientation on the dynamics of gas in the vicinity of merging black holes. We present a suite of eight simulations of unequal-mass,…
We present the results of 74 new simulations of nonprecessing spinning black hole binaries with mass ratios $q=m_1/m_2$ in the range $1/7\leq q\leq1$ and individual spins covering the parameter space $-0.95\leq\alpha_{1,2}\leq0.95$ with one…
Binary black-hole systems with spins aligned with the orbital angular momentum are of special interest, as studies indicate that this configuration is preferred in nature. If the spins of the two bodies differ, there can be a prominent…
We present a straightforward approach for estimating the final black hole spin of a binary black hole coalescence with arbitrary initial masses and spins. Making some simple assumptions, we estimate the final angular momentum to be the sum…
Binary black holes in which both spins are aligned with the binary's orbital angular momentum do not precess. However, the up-down configuration, in which the spin of the heavier (lighter) black hole is aligned (anti-aligned) with the…