Accretion disks around binary black holes of unequal mass: General relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations near decoupling

Gold, Roman; Paschalidis, Vasileios; Etienne, Z. B.; Shapiro, Stuart L.; Pfeiffer, Harald P.

doi:10.1103/physrevd.89.064060

Cited by 110 publications

(175 citation statements)

References 155 publications

(239 reference statements)

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“…An interesting consequence of the form of the recoil velocity (17) is that, for certain combinations of the spins and the mass ratio the total magnitude can be very small. In Fig.…”

Section: New Models Of Remnant Mass Spin and Recoilmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The probability of these large recoils depends on the distribution of mass ratios and spins of the progenitor binaries. While the detailed modeling of those recoil velocities from merging BHBs as a function of the individual spins (magnitudes and directions) of the BHs and the mass ratio is well underway [8][9][10][11][12], the major effort required to simulate BHBs in a realistic astrophysical environment started more recently [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. Analyses of Newtonian and post-Newtonian simulations appear to indicate that accretion dynamics will skew the spin distributions away from configurations that favor very large recoils [25][26][27] because these effects tend to align (or counter-align) the spins with the orbital angular momentum.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Remnant mass, spin, and recoil from spin aligned black-hole binaries

2014

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We perform a set of 36 nonprecessing black-hole binary simulations with spins either aligned or counteraligned with the orbital angular momentum in order to model the final mass, spin, and recoil of the merged black hole as a function of the individual black hole spin magnitudes and the mass ratio of the progenitors. We find that the maximum recoil for these configurations is Vmax = 526 ± 23 km s −1 , which occurs when the progenitor spins are maximal, the mass ratio is qmax = m1/m2 = 0.623 ± 0.038, the smaller black-hole spin is aligned with the orbital angular momentum, and the larger black-hole spin is counteraligned (α1 = −α2 = 1). This maximum recoil is about 80 km s −1 larger than previous estimates, but most importantly, because the maximum occurs for smaller mass ratios, the probability for a merging binary to recoil faster than 400 km s −1 can be as large as 17%, while the probability for recoils faster than 250 km s −1 can be as large as 45%. We provide explicit phenomenological formulas for the final mass, spin, and recoil as a function of the individual BH spins and the mass difference between the two black holes. Here we include terms up through fourth-order in the initial spins and mass difference, and find excellent agreement (within a few percent) with independent results available in the literature. The maximum radiated energy is E rad /m ≈ 11.3% and final spin α max rem ≈ 0.952 for equal mass, aligned maximally spinning binaries.

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“…An interesting consequence of the form of the recoil velocity (17) is that, for certain combinations of the spins and the mass ratio the total magnitude can be very small. In Fig.…”

Section: New Models Of Remnant Mass Spin and Recoilmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Remnant mass, spin, and recoil from spin aligned black-hole binaries

2014

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“…Numerical-relativity fitting formulae are available to compute kick velocities, but precession effects during the GW-driven inspiral must be taken into account, especially for configurations with sensibly different spin tilts θ1 = θ2 (Schnittman 2004;Kesden et al 2010a,b;Kesden et al 2015;Berti et al 2012;Gerosa et al 2013). GWs start driving the merger at the decoupling radius (Armitage & Natarajan 2002;Gold et al 2014; see also Milosavljević & Phinney 2005) rdec 760 GMbin c 2 α 0.2…”

Section: Differential Misalignment and Kick Velocitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Spin alignment and differential accretion in merging black hole binaries

Gerosa¹,

Veronesi²,

Lodato³

et al. 2015

Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc.

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Interactions between a supermassive black hole binary and the surrounding accretion disc can both assist the binary inspiral and align the black hole spins to the disc angular momentum. While binary migration is due to angular-momentum transfer within the circumbinary disc, the spin-alignment process is driven by the mass accreting on to each black hole. Mass transfer between different disc components thus couples the inspiral and the alignment process together. Mass is expected to leak through the cavity cleared by the binary, and preferentially accretes on to the lighter (secondary) black hole which orbits closer to the disc edge. Low accretion rate on to the heavier (primary) black hole slows the alignment process down. We revisit the problem and develop a semi-analytical model to describe the coupling between gas-driven inspiral and spin alignment, finding that binaries with mass ratio q 0.2 approach the gravitational-wave driven inspiral in differential misalignment: light secondaries prevent primaries from aligning. Binary black holes with misaligned primaries are ideal candidates for precession effects in the strong-gravity regime and may suffer from moderately large (∼ 1500 km/s) recoil velocities.

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“…Not taking into account the effects of magnetic fields in accretion disks seems to underestimate the accretion rate [81], see also recent GRMHD simulations of BH-NS mergers [82,83] and the accretion rates reported therein.…”

Section: B Maximum Rest-mass Density Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Numerical relativity simulations of thick accretion disks around tilted Kerr black holes

et al. 2016

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In this work we present 3D numerical relativity simulations of thick accretion disks around tilted Kerr black holes. We investigate the evolution of three different initial disk models with a range of initial black hole spin magnitudes and tilt angles. For all the disk-to-black hole mass ratios considered (0.044 − 0.16) we observe significant black hole precession and nutation during the evolution. This indicates that for such mass ratios, neglecting the self-gravity of the disks by evolving them in a fixed background black hole spacetime is not justified. We find that the two more massive models are unstable against the Papaloizou-Pringle (PP) instability and that those PP-unstable models remain unstable for all initial spins and tilt angles considered, showing that the development of the instability is a very robust feature of such PP-unstable disks. Our lightest model, which is the most astrophysically favorable outcome of mergers of binary compact objects, is stable. The tilt between the black hole spin and the disk is strongly modulated during the growth of the PP instability, causing a partial global realignment of black hole spin and disk angular momentum in the most massive model with constant specific angular momentum l. For the model with non-constant lprofile we observe a long-lived m = 1 non-axisymmetric structure which shows strong oscillations of the tilt angle in the inner regions of the disk. This effect might be connected to the development of Kozai-Lidov oscillations. Our simulations also confirm earlier findings that the development of the PP instability causes the long-term emission of large amplitude gravitational waves, predominantly for the l = m = 2 multipole mode. The imprint of the BH precession on the gravitational waves from tilted BH-torus systems remains an interesting open issue that would require significantly longer simulations than those presented in this work.

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Accretion disks around binary black holes of unequal mass: General relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations near decoupling

Cited by 110 publications

References 155 publications

Remnant mass, spin, and recoil from spin aligned black-hole binaries

Remnant mass, spin, and recoil from spin aligned black-hole binaries

Spin alignment and differential accretion in merging black hole binaries

Numerical relativity simulations of thick accretion disks around tilted Kerr black holes

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