1,989 research outputs found
Maximum gravitational recoil
Recent calculations of gravitational radiation recoil generated during
black-hole binary mergers have reopened the possibility that a merged binary
can be ejected even from the nucleus of a massive host galaxy. Here we report
the first systematic study of gravitational recoil of equal-mass binaries with
equal, but anti-aligned, spins parallel to the orbital plane. Such an
orientation of the spins is expected to maximize the recoil. We find that
recoil velocity (which is perpendicular to the orbital plane) varies
sinusoidally with the angle that the initial spin directions make with the
initial linear momenta of each hole and scales up to a maximum of ~4000 km/s
for maximally-rotating holes. Our results show that the amplitude of the recoil
velocity can depend sensitively on spin orientations of the black holes prior
to merger.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figs, revtex
On the accuracy of solving confluent Prony systems
In this paper we consider several nonlinear systems of algebraic equations
which can be called "Prony-type". These systems arise in various reconstruction
problems in several branches of theoretical and applied mathematics, such as
frequency estimation and nonlinear Fourier inversion. Consequently, the
question of stability of solution with respect to errors in the right-hand side
becomes critical for the success of any particular application. We investigate
the question of "maximal possible accuracy" of solving Prony-type systems,
putting stress on the "local" behavior which approximates situations with low
absolute measurement error. The accuracy estimates are formulated in very
simple geometric terms, shedding some light on the structure of the problem.
Numerical tests suggest that "global" solution techniques such as Prony's
algorithm and ESPRIT method are suboptimal when compared to this theoretical
"best local" behavior
Box modeling of the Eastern Mediterranean sea
In ∼1990 a new source of deep water formation in the Eastern Mediterranean was found in the southern part of the Aegean sea. Till then, the only source of deep water formation in the Eastern Mediterranean was in the Adriatic sea; the rate of the deep water formation of the new Aegean source is 1 Sv, three times larger than the Adriatic source. We develop a simple three-box model to study the stability of the thermohaline circulation of the Eastern Mediterranean sea. The three boxes represent the Adriatic sea, Aegean sea, and the Ionian seas. The boxes exchange heat and salinity and may be described by a set of nonlinear differential equations. We analyze these equations and find that the system may have one, two, or four stable flux states. We conjecture that the change in the deep water formation in the Eastern Mediterranean sea is attributed to a switch between the different states on the thermohaline circulation; this switch may result from decreased temperature and/or increased salinity over the Aegean sea
Sub-Riemannian Fast Marching in SE(2)
We propose a Fast Marching based implementation for computing sub-Riemanninan
(SR) geodesics in the roto-translation group SE(2), with a metric depending on
a cost induced by the image data. The key ingredient is a Riemannian
approximation of the SR-metric. Then, a state of the art Fast Marching solver
that is able to deal with extreme anisotropies is used to compute a SR-distance
map as the solution of a corresponding eikonal equation. Subsequent
backtracking on the distance map gives the geodesics. To validate the method,
we consider the uniform cost case in which exact formulas for SR-geodesics are
known and we show remarkable accuracy of the numerically computed SR-spheres.
We also show a dramatic decrease in computational time with respect to a
previous PDE-based iterative approach. Regarding image analysis applications,
we show the potential of considering these data adaptive geodesics for a fully
automated retinal vessel tree segmentation.Comment: CIARP 201
Modeling gravitational recoil from precessing highly-spinning unequal-mass black-hole binaries
We measure the gravitational recoil for unequal-mass-black- hole-binary
mergers, with the larger BH having spin a/m^H=0.8, and the smaller BH
non-spinning. We choose our configurations such that, initially, the spins lie
on the orbital plane. The spin and orbital plane precess significantly, and we
find that the out-of plane recoil (i.e. the recoil perpendicular to the orbital
plane around merger) varies as \eta^2 / (1+q), in agreement with our previous
prediction, based on the post-Newtonian scaling.Comment: Published version. 15 pages, 11 figures, revtex
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