On the equal-mass limit of precessing black-hole binaries
- Creators
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Gerosa, Davide
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Sperhake, Ulrich
- Vošmera, Jakub
Abstract
We analyze the inspiral dynamics of equal-mass precessing black-hole binaries using multi-timescale techniques. The orbit-averaged post-Newtonian evolutionary equations admit two constants of motion in the equal-mass limit, namely the magnitude of the total spin S and the effective spin ξ. This feature makes the entire dynamics qualitatively different compared to the generic unequal-mass case, where only ξ is constant while the variable S parametrizes the precession dynamics. For fixed individual masses and spin magnitudes, an equal-mass black-hole inspiral is uniquely characterized by the two parameters (S, ξ): these two numbers completely determine the entire evolution under the effect of radiation reaction. In particular, for equal-mass binaries we find that (i) the black-hole binary spin morphology is constant throughout the inspiral, and that (ii) the precessional motion of the two black-hole spins about the total spin takes place on a longer timescale than the precession of the total spin and the orbital plane about the total angular momentum.
Additional Information
© 2017 IOP Publishing Ltd. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. Received 20 December 2016, revised 25 January 2017; Accepted for publication 6 February 2017; Published 1 March 2017. We thank Michael Kesden, Emanuele Berti and Richard O'Shaughnessy for several stimulating discussions. DG is supported by NASA through Einstein Postdoctoral Fellowship grant No. PF6-170152 awarded by the Chandra x-ray Center, which is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for NASA under contract NAS8-03060. Additional support is acknowledged by NSF CAREER grants PHY-1151197 and PHY-1404569, the UK STFC, and the Isaac Newton Studentship of the University of Cambridge. JV was supported by the Bridgewater Summer Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme and the Churchill College Small Grants fund at the University of Cambridge. 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. Figures were generated using the Python package matplotlib [50].Attached Files
Published - Gerosa_2017_Class._Quantum_Grav._34_064004.pdf
Submitted - 1612.05263.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 74674
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20170302-161619997
- PF6-170152
- NASA Einstein Fellowship
- NAS8-03060
- NASA
- PHY-1151197
- NSF
- PHY-1404569
- NSF
- ST/L000636/1
- Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
- University of Cambridge
- 690904
- Marie Curie Fellowship
- 646597
- European Research Council (ERC)
- PHY-090003
- NSF
- Higher Education Funding Council for England
- ST/J005673/1
- Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
- ST/H008586/1
- Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
- ST/K00333X/1
- Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
- Created
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2017-03-03Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2022-07-12Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- TAPIR