Measuring coalescing massive binary black holes with gravitational waves: The impact of spin-induced precession

By R. Lang, S. Hughes. 2006

135 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The coalescence of massive black holes generates gravitational waves (GWs) that will be measurable by space-based detectors such as LISA to large redshifts. The spins of a binary's black holes have an important impact on its waveform. Specifically, geodetic and gravitomagnetic effects cause the spins to precess; this precession then modulates the waveform, adding periodic structure which encodes useful information about the binary's members. Following pioneering work by Vecchio, we examine the impact upon GW measurements of including these precession-induced modulations in the waveform model. We find that the additional periodicity due to spin precession breaks degeneracies among certain parameters, greatly improving the accuracy with which they may be measured. In particular, mass measurements are improved tremendously, by one to several orders of magnitude. Localization of the source on the sky is also improved, though not as much--low redshift systems can be localized to an ellipse which is roughly 10-a fewx10 arcminutes in the long direction and a factor of 2 smaller in the short direction. Though not a drastic improvement relative to analyses which neglect spin precession, even modest gains in source localization will greatly facilitate searches for electromagnetic counterparts to GW events. Determination of distance to the sourcemore » is likewise improved: We find that relative error in measured luminosity distance is commonly {approx}0.1%-0.4% at z{approx}1. Finally, with the inclusion of precession, we find that the magnitude of the spins themselves can typically be determined for low redshift systems with an accuracy of about 0.1%-10%, depending on the spin value, allowing accurate surveys of mass and spin evolution over cosmic time.« less

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Citations in the corpus

LISA technology and instrumentation (2009, background): “the coalescence of massive black holes even at redshifts of z = 20 with a signal-to-noise-ratio of several hundreds [17, 23, 24].”
Black-hole binaries, gravitational waves, and numerical relativity (2010, background): “ greatly enhances parameter estimation, removing some parameter correlations and hence reducing certain errors by several orders of magnitude (though other parameters are signiﬁcantly less improved) (Lang and Hughes, 2006, 2008, 2009; Sintes and Vecchio, 2000; Trias and Sintes, 2008). It is expected”
THE ASSEMBLY OF SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES AT HIGH REDSHIFTS (2008, background): “The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) is expected to be able to detect mergers of SMBHs in the mass range ∼(104–107) M /(1+z) out to z ∼ 30, and to extract binary spins and BH masses with high precision up to z ∼ 10 (Vecchio 2004; Lang & Hughes 2006, 2007).”
Cosmological Black Hole Spin Evolution by Mergers and Accretion (2008, background): “These plots are useful to isolate the contribution of mergers to the spin evolution of the whole BH population, and they are of direct interest for LISA observations of massive BH inspiral, merger and ringdown (Berti et al. 2005, 2006; Lang & Hughes 2006; Kocsis et al. 2007).”
Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology with Gravitational Waves (2009, unknown): “Figure reprinted with permission from [231].”
The evolution of massive black holes and their spins in their galactic hosts (2012, background): “…Volonteri, & Haardt2007; Sesana et al. 2011), but for each merger event it should also be able to determine whether the MBH binary has precessing or aligned spins, by looking at the higher order harmonics of the gravitational waveforms (Lang & Hughes 2006, 2007, 2008; Lang, Hughes, & Cornish 2011).”
EXPLORING SHORT GAMMA-RAY BURSTS AS GRAVITATIONAL-WAVE STANDARD SIRENS (2009, background): “In general relativity, spin drives precession effects which can “color” the waveform in important ways, and which can in principle have important observational effects (see, e.g., Lang & Hughes 2006, van der Sluys et al. 2008).”