Inspiral, merger, and ringdown of unequal mass black hole binaries: A multipolar analysis

By Emanuele Berti, V. Cardoso, José A. González, Ulrich Sperhake, M. Hannam, Sascha Husa, B. Bruegmann. 2007

269 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the inspiral, merger, and ringdown of unequal mass black hole binaries by analyzing a catalogue of numerical simulations for seven different values of the mass ratio (from q=M2/M1=1 to q=4). We compare numerical and post-Newtonian results by projecting the waveforms onto spin-weighted spherical harmonics, characterized by angular indices (l,m). We find that the post-Newtonian equations predict remarkably well the relation between the wave amplitude and the orbital frequency for each (l,m), and that the convergence of the post-Newtonian series to the numerical results is nonmonotonic. To leading order, the total energy emitted in the merger phase scales like η2 and the spin of the final black hole scales like η, where η=q/(1+q)2 is the symmetric mass ratio. We study the multipolar distribution of the radiation, finding that odd-l multipoles are suppressed in the equal mass limit. Higher multipoles carry a larger fraction of the total energy as q increases. We introduce and compare three different definitions for the ringdown starting time. Applying linear-estimation methods (the so-called Prony methods) to the ringdown phase, we find resolution-dependent time variations in the fitted parameters of the final black hole. By cross correlating information from different multipoles, we show that ringdown fits can be used to obtain precise estimates of the mass and spin of the final black hole, which are in remarkable agreement with energy and angular momentum balance calculations.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/429e5f5fb5d38afcf8cc13621d06c6b2f54e54fa

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Citations in the corpus

Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2018, background): “Low spins argue against so-called second-generation mergers, where at least one of the components of the binary is a BH formed from a previous merger(Berti et al. 2007; González et al. 2007) and possesses spins near 0.7(Fishbach et al. 2017).”
Cosmological Black Hole Spin Evolution by Mergers and Accretion (2008, methodology): “Simulations have also been carried out for some “generic” orientations of the initial spins, including configurations leading to spin-flips or to Schwarzschild remnants (Campanelli et al. 2007; Herrmann et al. 2007; Tichy & Marronetti 2007; Berti et al. 2007b).”
Grand unification of AGN activity in the ΛCDM cosmology (2009, background): “In the case where the masses are unequal but the spins are zero, the final spin can be estimated by the analytic expression af ≃ 2 √ 3 q (1 + q)2 − 2.029 q 2 (1 + q)4 , (28) whereq = M2/M1 6 1 is the mass ratio of the progenitor BHs (Berti et al. 2007).”
Modeling ringdown: Beyond the fundamental quasinormal modes (2014, background): “Indeed, previous studies have found success in treating the dominant multipoles as single QNMs during ringdown [9, 37].”
MERGING BLACK HOLE BINARIES IN GALACTIC NUCLEI: IMPLICATIONS FOR ADVANCED-LIGO DETECTIONS (2016, unknown): “In addition, equal-mass non-spinning binaries produce a rotating (Kerr) BH with final spin magnitude χ ≈ 0.69 (Hofmann et al. 2016), so that BHs undergoing more than one merger inside the cluster will have a finite spin magnitude (Berti et al. 2007).”
Black-hole binaries, gravitational waves, and numerical relativity (2010, background): “Initial models suitable for detection and (perhaps) parameter estimation of low-SNR signals, will require much further development for application to the high-SNR observations expected with future instrument upgrades, such as Advanced LIGO, and future instruments such as LISA.”
Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology with Gravitational Waves (2009, background): “The top and middle panels of Figure 11 compare as functions of black hole spin and the symmetric mass ratio the goodness of their fit (blue short-dashed line, top panels) with the predictions of numerical simulations (circles and stars) from different groups (AEI [311], FAU–Jena [251], Jena [75] and”