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Published May 15, 2018 | Published + Submitted
Journal Article Open

Black-hole kicks from numerical-relativity surrogate models

Abstract

Binary black holes radiate linear momentum in gravitational waves as they merge. Recoils imparted to the black-hole remnant can reach thousands of km/s, thus ejecting black holes from their host galaxies. We exploit recent advances in gravitational waveform modeling to quickly and reliably extract recoils imparted to generic, precessing, black-hole binaries. Our procedure uses a numerical-relativity surrogate model to obtain the gravitational waveform given a set of binary parameters; then, from this waveform we directly integrate the gravitational-wave linear momentum flux. This entirely bypasses the need for fitting formulas which are typically used to model black-hole recoils in astrophysical contexts. We provide a thorough exploration of the black-hole kick phenomenology in the parameter space, summarizing and extending previous numerical results on the topic. Our extraction procedure is made publicly available as a module for the Python programming language named surrkick. Kick evaluations take ∼0.1 s on a standard off-the-shelf machine, thus making our code ideal to be ported to large-scale astrophysical studies.

Additional Information

© 2018 American Physical Society. Received 12 February 2018; published 25 May 2018. We thank Jonathan Blackman, Chad Galley, Mark Scheel, Ulrich Sperhake, Saul Teukolsky, and Vijay Varma for fruitful discussions and technical help. D. G. 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 No. NAS8–03060. F. H. acknowledges the support of the Sherman Fairchild Foundation, and NSF Grants No. PHY-1404569, PHY-1708212, and PHY-1708213 at Caltech. L. C. S. acknowledges the support of NSF Grant No. PHY-1404569 and the Brinson Foundation. Computations were performed on resources provided by NSF CAREER Grant No. PHY-1151197, and on the Wheeler cluster at Caltech, which is supported by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation and by Caltech.

Attached Files

Published - PhysRevD.97.104049.pdf

Submitted - 1802.04276.pdf

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PhysRevD.97.104049.pdf
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August 19, 2023
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