Related papers: Boosted three-dimensional black-hole evolutions wi…
Numerical relativity has faced the problem that standard 3+1 simulations of black hole spacetimes without singularity excision and with singularity avoiding lapse and vanishing shift fail after an evolution time of around 30-40M due to the…
Coalescing binary black holes experience a ``kick'' due to anisotropic emission of gravitational waves with an amplitude as great as 200$ km/s. We examine the orbital evolution of black holes that have been kicked from the centers of…
Hierarchical structure formation inevitably leads to the formation of supermassive binary black holes (BBHs) with a sub-parsec separation in galactic nuclei. However, to date there has been no unambiguous detection of such systems. In an…
The orbital evolution of a binary system consisting of two primordial black hole clusters is investigated. Such clusters are predicted in some theoretical models with broken symmetry in the inflation Lagrangian. A cluster consists of the…
Dark matter around black holes can induce drag forces through dynamical friction and accretion, potentially affecting the orbital evolution and gravitational wave emission of binary systems. While dynamical friction from scalar field dark…
We study the dynamical evolution of eccentric massive black hole binaries (MBHBs) interacting with unbound stars by means of an extensive set of three body scattering experiments. Compared to previous studies, we extend the investigation…
For a pair of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in the remnant of a dual galaxy merger, well-known models exist to describe their dynamical evolution until the final coalescence accompanied by the emission of a low-frequency gravitational…
We present the first study of the dynamical evolution of a star cluster that combines a significant population of primordial binaries with the presence of a central black hole. We use direct N-body simulations, with a black hole mass of…
We discuss a new N-body simulation method for studying black hole binary dynamics. This method avoids previous numerical problems due to large mass ratios and trapped orbits with short periods. A treatment of relativistic effects is…
We present results from a new code for binary black hole evolutions using the moving-puncture approach, implementing finite differences in generalised coordinates, and allowing the spacetime to be covered with multiple communicating…
Supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHs) are expected to result from galaxy mergers, and thus are natural byproducts (and probes) of hierarchical structure formation in the Universe. They are also the primary expected source of…
We present a novel self-consistent theoretical framework to characterize the formation, evolution, and merger sites of dynamically-formed black hole binaries, with a focus on explaining the most massive events observed by the…
One of the plausible unification schemes in physics considers the observable universe to be a 4-dimensional surface (the "brane") embedded in a higher-dimensional curved spacetime (the "bulk"). In such braneworld gravity models with…
The putative ubiquity of massive black holes (MBH) at the center of galaxies, and the hierarchical progress of structure formation along the cosmic history, together necessarily imply the existence of a large population of cosmic MBH…
We present a study of the gravitational waveforms from a series of spinning, equal-mass black hole binaries focusing on the harmonic content of the waves and the contribution of the individual harmonics to the signal-to-noise ratio. The…
We investigate the evolution of a massive black hole pair under the action of dynamical friction (DF) by a uniform background of light stars with isotropic velocity distribution. In our scenario, the primary black hole $M_1$ sits, at rest,…
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…
We extend previous work on 3D black hole excision to the case of distorted black holes, with a variety of dynamic gauge conditions that are able to respond naturally to the spacetime dynamics. We show that the combination of excision and…
We explicitly demonstrate that current numerical relativity techniques are able to accurately evolve black hole binaries with mass ratios of the order of 1000:1. This proof of principle is relevant for future third generation (3G)…
Superradiant instabilities of spinning black holes can be used to impose strong constraints on ultralight bosons, thus turning black holes into effective particle detectors. However, very little is known about the development of the…