Black hole mergers and unstable circular orbits

Pretorius, Frans; Khurana, Deepak

doi:10.1088/0264-9381/24/12/s07

Cited by 142 publications

(175 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…While recent work by Pretorius and Khurana [44] suggests that certain finely tuned eccentric orbits can be exponentially sensitive to initial conditions, stable circular orbits of non-spinning BBHs should remain circular until the final plunge and merger.…”

Section: Series Expansions For the Final Observablesmentioning

confidence: 97%

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Spin expansion for binary black hole mergers: New predictions and future directions

Boyle

Kesden

2008

Phys. Rev. D

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In a recent paper [1], 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 quantities like the black hole mass m, kick velocity k, and spin vector s, rather than a detailed understanding of the merger dynamics. In this paper, we expand on this proposal, examine how well its predictions agree with current simulations, and discuss several future directions that would make it an even more valuable tool. The spin expansion yields many new predictions, including several exact results that may be useful for testing numerical codes. Some of these predictions have already been confirmed, while others await future simulations. We explain how a relatively small number of simulations -10 equal-mass simulations, and 16 unequal-mass simulations -may be used to calibrate all of the coefficients in the spin expansion up to second order at the minimum computational cost. For a more general set of simulations of given covariance, we derive the minimum-variance unbiased estimators for the spin expansion coefficients. We discuss how this calibration would be interesting and fruitful for general relativity and astrophysics. Finally, we sketch the extension to eccentric orbits.

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Section: Series Expansions For the Final Observablesmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…With the exception of a few papers (e.g. [44,45,46,47,48]), simulations of BBH mergers thus far have focused on circular orbits. Nevertheless, in Appendix E, we will explain the extension of our formalism to non-circular (eccentric) orbits.…”

Section: A Preliminariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spin expansion for binary black hole mergers: New predictions and future directions

Boyle

Kesden

2008

Phys. Rev. D

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“…The total mass M and angular momentum J = aM of the Kerr geometry is set to the (instantaneous) net rest mass and sum of spin and orbital angular momenta of the binary respectively, while the parameters of the geodesic are the (instantaneous) reduced energy and orbital angular momentum of the binary. This is akin to an effective one body reduction, and the reason we include orbital angular momentum in the spin of the effective black hole is this was shown to better reproduce zoom-whirl like behavior in a similar geodesic model of equal mass merger simulation results [35]. Note though that in this study we only consider spinless binary components, so the spin of the effective Kerr black hole is entirely due to orbital angular momentum.…”

Section: A Inspiral Modelmentioning

confidence: 93%

Detecting gravitational waves from highly eccentric compact binaries

2014

Self Cite

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In dense stellar regions, highly eccentric binaries of black holes and neutron stars can form through various n-body interactions. Such a binary could emit a significant fraction of its binding energy in a sequence of largely isolated gravitational wave bursts prior to merger. Given expected black hole and neutron star masses, many such systems will emit these repeated bursts at frequencies within the sensitive band of contemporary ground-based gravitational wave detectors. Unfortunately, existing gravitational wave searches are ill-suited to detect these signals. In this work, we adapt a "power stacking" method to the detection of gravitational wave signals from highly eccentric binaries. We implement this method as an extension of the Q-transform, a projection onto a multiresolution basis of windowed complex exponentials that has previously been used to analyze data from the network of LIGO/Virgo detectors. Our method searches for excess power over an ensemble of time-frequency tiles. We characterize the performance of our method using Monte Carlo experiments with signals injected in simulated detector noise. Our results indicate that the power stacking method achieves substantially better sensitivity to eccentric binary signals than existing localized burst searches.PACS numbers: 95.30.Sf, 97.60.Lf

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“…When two black holes are shot at one another at close to the speed of light, they can orbit more than once before either merging or scattering. These orbits are reminiscent of unstable geodesics and some of them display a "zoom-whirl" type of behavior [122,103,123]. Fig.…”

Section: Anatomy Of Close Fly-by'smentioning

confidence: 99%

Black hole bombs and explosions: from astrophysics to particle physics

Cardoso

2013

Gen Relativ Gravit

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Black holes are the elementary particles of gravity, the final state of sufficiently massive stars and of energetic collisions. With a forty-year long history, black hole physics is a fully-blossomed field which promises to embrace several branches of theoretical physics. Here I review the main developments in highly dynamical black holes with an emphasis on high energy black hole collisions and probes of particle physics via superradiance. This write-up, rather than being a collection of well known results, is intended to highlight open issues and the most intriguing results.Keywords Black holes · Superradiance · Cosmic Censorship · Transplanckian collisions IntroductionThe Kerr-Newman family of black holes in stationary four-dimensional, asymptotically flat spacetimes exhausts all possible electro-vacuum solutions in General Relativity. Theoretical aspects of black hole physics were fully developed decades ago, when the Kerr-Newman family was discovered and characterized. Most of the tools to understand black hole physics have been in place since that period and most processes involving black holes were controlled at the order-of-magnitude level for at least two decades. Perhaps due to these reasons, "black hole physics" conjures up images of horizons and time-warps and old-fashioned, frozen-in-time topics to lay audiences. However, in the last years the activity in the field is bubbling up Vitor Cardoso CENTRA, Departamento de Física, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa -UTL, Av. Rovisco Pais 1, 1049 Lisboa, Portugal E-mail: vitor.cardoso@ist.utl.pt Present address: Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario N2J 2W9, Canada 2 Vitor Cardoso and the interest in these issues has widened, driven by several unrelated events at the observational/instrumental, technical and conceptual levels such as (i) our capacity to observationally scrutinize the region close to the horizon within a few Schwarzschild radii, with radio and deep infrared interferometry, of which we have seen but the first steps [1,2,3,4];(ii) the ability to measure black hole spins more accurately than ever before using X-ray spectroscopy [5,6] or "continuum-fitting" methods [7]. Measurement of black hole mass and spin is one necessary step in testing General Relativity [8]; (iii) huge technological progress in gravitational-wave observatories, some of which had been gathering data at design sensitivities for several years and are now being upgraded to sensitivities one order of magnitude higher (black hole binaries are thought to be among the first objects to ever be detected in the gravitational-wave spectrum);(iv) our ability to numerically evolve black hole binaries at the full nonlinear level [9,10,11] and its immediate importance for gravitational-wave searches and high-energy physics [12]; (v) improvement of perturbative schemes, either by an understanding of regularization schemes to handle the self-force [13,14], or by faster and more powerful methods to deal with the full ladder of pe...

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Black hole mergers and unstable circular orbits

Cited by 142 publications

References 45 publications

Spin expansion for binary black hole mergers: New predictions and future directions

Spin expansion for binary black hole mergers: New predictions and future directions

Detecting gravitational waves from highly eccentric compact binaries

Black hole bombs and explosions: from astrophysics to particle physics

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