Exploring black hole superkicks

By B. Bruegmann, José A. González, M. Hannam, Sascha Husa, Ulrich Sperhake. 2007

143 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent calculations of the recoil velocity in black-hole binary mergers have found kick velocities of ≈2500 km/s for equal-mass binaries with antialigned initial spins in the orbital plane. In general the dynamics of spinning black holes can be extremely complicated and are difficult to analyze and understand. In contrast, the “superkick” configuration is an example with a high degree of symmetry that also exhibits exciting physics. We exploit the simplicity of this test case to study more closely the role of spin in black-hole recoil and find that the recoil is with good accuracy proportional to the difference between the (l=2,m=±2) modes of Ψ4, the major contribution to the recoil occurs within 30M before and after the merger, and that this is after the time at which a standard post-Newtonian treatment breaks down. We also discuss consequences of the (l=2,m=±2) asymmetry in the gravitational wave signal for the angular dependence of the signal-to-noise ratio and the mismatch of the gravitational wave signals corresponding to the north and south poles.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7a607fc4c3299fcc74a208da0d58fe14ab24dc32

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology with Gravitational Waves (2009, background): “Some are studying the effect of the spin orientations of the component black holes on the linear momentum carried away by the final black hole, fancifully called kicks [188, 92, 62, 105, 180, 294]; some have focused on the dependence of the emitted waveform phase and energy on the mass ratio; and ye”
Black-hole binaries, gravitational waves, and numerical relativity (2010, methodology): “Brügmann et al. (2008a) studied the role of spin in producing superkicks.”