Zoom-Whirl Orbits in Black Hole Binaries

Zoom-whirl behavior has the reputation of being a rare phenomenon. The concern has been that gravitational radiation would drain angular momentum so rapidly that generic orbits would circularize before zoom-whirl behavior could play out, and only rare highly tuned orbits would retain their imprint. Using full numerical relativity, we catch zoom-whirl behavior despite dissipation. The larger the mass ratio, the longer the pair can spend in orbit before merging and therefore the more zooms and whirls seen. Larger spins also enhance zoom-whirliness. An important implication is that these eccentric orbits can merge during a whirl phase, before enough angular momentum has been lost to truly circularize the orbit. Waveforms will be modulated by the harmonics of zoom-whirls, showing quiet phases during zooms and louder glitches during whirls.Comment: Replaced with published versio

Extraction of gravitational-wave energy in higher dimensional numerical relativity using the Weyl tensor

© 2017 IOP Publishing Ltd. Gravitational waves are one of the most important diagnostic tools in the analysis of strong-gravity dynamics and have been turned into an observational channel with LIGO's detection of GW150914. Aside from their importance in astrophysics, black holes and compact matter distributions have also assumed a central role in many other branches of physics. These applications often involve spacetimes with D > 4 dimensions where the calculation of gravitational waves is more involved than in the four dimensional case, but has now become possible thanks to substantial progress in the theoretical study of general relativity in D > 4. Here, we develop a numerical implementation of the formalism by Godazgar and Reall [1] - based on projections of the Weyl tensor analogous to the Newman-Penrose scalars - that allows for the calculation of gravitational waves in higher dimensional spacetimes with rotational symmetry. We apply and test this method in black-hole head-on collisions from rest in D = 6 spacetime dimensions and find that a fraction of the Arnowitt-Deser-Misner mass is radiated away from the system, in excellent agreement with literature results based on the Kodama-Ishibashi perturbation technique. The method presented here complements the perturbative approach by automatically including contributions from all multipoles rather than computing the energy content of individual multipoles.This work has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie SkŁodowska-Curie grant agreement No 690904, from H2020-ERC-2014-CoG Grant No. 'MaGRaTh' 646597, from STFC Consolidator Grant No. ST/L000636/1, the SDSC Comet, PSC-Bridges and TACC Stampede clusters through NSF-XSEDE Award Nos. PHY-090003, the Cambridge High Performance Computing Service Supercomputer Darwin using Strategic Research Infrastructure Funding from the HEFCE and the STFC, and DiRAC's Cosmos Shared Memory system through BIS Grant No. ST/J005673/1 and STFC Grant Nos. ST/H008586/1, ST/K00333X/1. WGC is supported by a STFC studentship

Orbiting black-hole binaries and apparent horizons in higher dimensions

We study gravitational wave emission and the structure and formation of apparent horizons in orbiting black-hole binary systems in higher-dimensional general relativity. For this purpose we present an apparent horizon finder for use in higher dimensional numerical simulations and test the finder's accuracy and consistency in single and binary black-hole spacetimes. The black-hole binaries we model in $D=6$ dimensions complete up to about one orbit before merging or scatter off each other without formation of a common horizon. In agreement with the absence of stable circular geodesic orbits around higher-dimensional black holes, we do not find binaries completing multiple orbits without finetuning of the initial data. All binaries radiate about $0.13\,\%$ to $0.2\,\%$ of the total mass-energy in gravitational waves, over an order of magnitude below the radiated energy measured for four-dimensional binaries. The low radiative efficiency is accompanied by relatively slow dynamics of the binaries as expected from the more rapid falloff of the binding gravitational force in higher dimensions

Eccentric binary black-hole mergers: The transition from inspiral to plunge in general relativity

We study the transition from inspiral to plunge in general relativity by computing gravitational waveforms of non-spinning, equal-mass black-hole binaries. We consider three sequences of simulations, starting with a quasi-circular inspiral completing 1.5, 2.3 and 9.6 orbits, respectively, prior to coalescence of the holes. For each sequence, the binding energy of the system is kept constant and the orbital angular momentum is progressively reduced, producing orbits of increasing eccentricity and eventually a head-on collision. We analyze in detail the radiation of energy and angular momentum in gravitational waves, the contribution of different multipolar components and the final spin of the remnant. We find that the motion transitions from inspiral to plunge when the orbital angular momentum L=L_crit is about 0.8M^2. For L<L_crit the radiated energy drops very rapidly. Orbits with L of about L_crit produce our largest dimensionless Kerr parameter for the remnant, j=J/M^2=0.724. Generalizing a model recently proposed by Buonanno, Kidder and Lehner to eccentric binaries, we conjecture that (1) j=0.724 is the maximal Kerr parameter that can be obtained by any merger of non-spinning holes, and (2) no binary merger (even if the binary members are extremal Kerr black holes with spins aligned to the orbital angular momentum, and the inspiral is highly eccentric) can violate the cosmic censorship conjecture.Comment: Added sequence of long inspirals to the study. To match published versio

Black-hole head-on collisions in higher dimensions

The collision of black holes and the emission of gravitational radiation in higher-dimensional spacetimes are of interest in various research areas, including the gauge-gravity duality, the TeV gravity scenarios evoked for the explanation of the hierarchy problem, and the large-dimensionality limit of general relativity. We present numerical simulations of head-on collisions of nonspinning, unequal-mass black holes starting from rest in general relativity with $4 \leq D\leq 10$ spacetime dimensions. We compare the energy and linear momentum radiated in gravitational waves with perturbative predictions in the extreme mass ratio limit, demonstrating the strength and limitations of black-hole perturbation theory in this context

Gravity-dominated unequal-mass black hole collisions

We continue our series of studies of high-energy collisions of black holes investigating unequal-mass, boosted head-on collisions in four dimensions. We show that the fraction of the center-of-mass energy radiated as gravitational waves becomes independent of mass ratio and approximately equal to $13\%$ at large energies. We support this conclusion with calculations using black hole perturbation theory and Smarr's zero-frequency limit approximation. These results lend strong support to the conjecture that the detailed structure of the colliding objects is irrelevant at high energies.This work was supported by the H2020-MSCA-RISE-2015 Grant No. StronGrHEP- 690904, the SDSC Comet and TACC Stampede clusters through NSF-XSEDE Grant No. PHY-090003, STFC Consolidator Grant No. ST/L000636/1, and DiRAC’s Cosmos Shared Memory system through BIS Grant No. ST/J005673/1 and STFC Grant Nos. ST/H008586/1, ST/K00333X/1. E.B. is supported by NSF CAREER Grant No. PHY-1055103 and by FCT contract IF/00797/2014/CP1214/CT0012 under the IF2014 Programme. V.C. thanks the Departament de F´ısica Fonamental at Universitat de Barcelona for hospitality while this work was being completed. V.C. and U.S. acknowledge financial support provided under the European Union’s H2020 ERC Consolidator Grant “Matter and strong-field gravity: New frontiers in Einstein’s theory” grant agreement no. MaGRaTh–646597. V.C. also acknowledges financial support from FCT under Sabbatical Fellowship nr. SFRH/BSAB/105955/2014. F.P. acknowledges financial support from the Simons Foundation and NSF grant PHY-1305682. This research was supported in part by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Research at Perimeter Institute is supported by the Government of Canada through Industry Canada and by the Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Economic Development & Innovation.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from APS Physics via http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.93.04401

Dimensional reduction in numerical relativity: Modified Cartoon formalism and regularization

We present in detail the Einstein equations in the Baumgarte-Shapiro-Shibata-Nakamura formulation for the case of $D$ dimensional spacetimes with $SO(D-d)$ isometry based on a method originally introduced in Ref.1. Regularized expressions are given for a numerical implementation of this method on a vertex centered grid including the origin of the quasi-radial coordinate that covers the extra dimensions with rotational symmetry. Axisymmetry, corresponding to the value $d=D-2$, represents a special case with fewer constraints on the vanishing of tensor components and is conveniently implemented in a variation of the general method. The robustness of the scheme is demonstrated for the case of a black-hole head-on collision in $D=7$ spacetime dimensions with $SO(4)$ symmetry.U.S. is supported by the H2020 ERC Consolidator Grant “Matter and strong-field gravity: New frontiers in Einstein’s theory” grant agreement No. MaGRaTh–646597, the H2020-MSCA-RISE-2015 Grant No. StronGrHEP-690904, the STFC Consolidator Grant No. ST/L000636/1, the SDSC Comet and TACC Stampede clusters through NSF-XSEDE Award Nos. PHY-090003, the Cambridge High Performance Computing Service Supercomputer Darwin using Strategic Research Infrastructure Funding from the HEFCE and the STFC, and DiRAC’s Cosmos Shared Memory system through BIS Grant No. ST/J005673/1 and STFC Grant Nos. ST/H008586/1, ST/K00333X/1. P.F. and S.T. are supported by the H2020 ERC Starting Grant “New frontiers in numerical general relativity” grant agreement No. NewNGR- 639022. P.F. is also supported by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. W.G.C. and M.K. are supported by STFC studentships.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from the World Scientific Publishing Company via http://dx.doi.org/10.1142/S021827181641013

Beyond the Bowen-York extrinsic curvature for spinning black holes

It is well-known that Bowen-York initial data contain spurious radiation. Although this ``junk'' radiation has been seen to be small for non-spinning black-hole binaries in circular orbit, its magnitude increases when the black holes are given spin. It is possible to reduce the spurious radiation by applying the puncture approach to multiple Kerr black holes, as we demonstrate for examples of head-on collisions of equal-mass black-hole binaries.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, submitted to special "New Frontiers in Numerical Relativity" issue of Classical and Quantum Gravit

Multi-timescale analysis of phase transitions in precessing black-hole binaries

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from APS via http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.92.064016The dynamics of precessing binary black holes (BBHs) in the post-Newtonian regime has a strong timescale hierarchy: the orbital timescale is very short compared to the spin-precession timescale which, in turn, is much shorter than the radiation-reaction timescale on which the orbit is shrinking due to gravitational-wave emission. We exploit this timescale hierarchy to develop a multi-scale analysis of BBH dynamics elaborating on the analysis of Kesden et al. (2015). We solve the spin-precession equations analytically on the precession time and then implement a quasi-adiabatic approach to evolve these solutions on the longer radiation-reaction time. This procedure leads to an innovative "precession-averaged" post-Newtonian approach to studying precessing BBHs. We use our new solutions to classify BBH spin precession into three distinct morphologies, then investigate phase transitions between these morphologies as BBHs inspiral. These precession-averaged post-Newtonian inspirals can be efficiently calculated from arbitrarily large separations, thus making progress towards bridging the gap between astrophysics and numerical relativity.D.G. is supported by the UK STFC and the Isaac Newton Studentship of the University of Cambridge. M.K. is supported by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant FG-2015-65299. R.O'S. is supported by NSF grants PHY-0970074 and PHY-1307429. E.B. is sup- ported by NSF CAREER Grant PHY-1055103 and by FCT contract IF/00797/2014/CP1214/CT0012 under the IF2014 Programme. U.S. is supported by FP7- PEOPLE-2011-CIG Grant No. 293412, FP7-PEOPLE- 2011-IRSES Grant No.295189, H2020 ERC Consolida- tor Grant Agreement No. MaGRaTh-646597, SDSC and TACC through XSEDE Grant No. PHY-090003 by the NSF, Finis Terrae through Grant No. ICTS- CESGA-249, STFC Roller Grant No. ST/L000636/1 and DiRAC's Cosmos Shared Memory system through BIS Grant No. ST/J005673/1 and STFC Grant Nos. ST/H008586/1, ST/K00333X/1