Reducing orbital eccentricity in binary black hole simulations

By Harald P. Pfeiffer, Duncan A. Brown, Lawrence E. Kidder, L. Lindblom, G. Lovelace, Mark A. Scheel. 2007

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Binary black hole simulations starting from quasi-circular (i.e., zero radial velocity) initial data have orbits with small but nonzero orbital eccentricities. In this paper, the quasi-equilibrium initial-data method is extended to allow nonzero radial velocities to be specified in binary black hole initial data. New low-eccentricity initial data are obtained by adjusting the orbital frequency and radial velocities to minimize the orbital eccentricity, and the resulting (∼5 orbit) evolutions are compared with those of quasi-circular initial data. Evolutions of the quasi-circular data clearly show eccentric orbits, with eccentricity that decays over time. The precise decay rate depends on the definition of eccentricity; if defined in terms of variations in the orbital frequency, the decay rate agrees well with the prediction of Peters (1964 Phys. Rev. 136 1224–32). The gravitational waveforms, which contain ∼8 cycles in the dominant l = m = 2 mode, are largely unaffected by the eccentricity of the quasi-circular initial data. The overlap between the dominant mode in the quasi-circular evolution and the same mode in the low-eccentricity evolution is about 0.99.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d62f849b8994db89f5089a4f5ae5a8e5f7201d6a

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

  1. B. Kelly
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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

  1. J. V. Meter
  2. B. Kelly
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  4. J. Centrella

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