Suppression of extreme orbital evolution in triple systems with short-range forces

By B. Liu, D. Muñoz, D. Lai. 2014

161 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Lidov-Kozai (LK) mechanism plays an important role in the secular evolution of many hierarchical triple systems. The standard LK mechanism consists of large-amplitude oscillations in eccentricity and inclination of a binary subject to the quadrupole potential from an outer perturber. Recent work has shown that when the octupole terms are included in the potential, the inner binary can reach more extreme eccentricities as well as undergo orientation flips. It is known that pericenter precessions due to short-range effects, such as General Relativity and tidal and rotational distortions, can limit the growth of eccentricity and even suppress standard (quadrupolar) LK oscillations, but their effect on the octupole-level LK mechanism has not been fully explored. In this paper, we systematically study how these short-range forces affect the extreme orbital behaviour found in octupole LK cycles. In general, the influence of the octupole potential is confined to a range of initial mutual inclinations Itot centered around 90deg (when the inner binary mass ratio is <<1), with this range expanding with increasing octupole strength. We find that, while the short-range forces do not change the width and location of this "window of influence", they impose a strict upper limit on the maximum achievable eccentricity. This limiting eccentricity can be calculated analytically, and its value holds even for strong octupole potential and for the general case of three comparable masses. Short-range forces also affect orbital flips, progressively reducing the range of Itot within which flips are possible as the intensity of these forces increases.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Geophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e106ff7449970182e65cb4b40a89ac116da2ffe4

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. C. Petrovich
2. F. Antonini
3. S. Naoz
4. B. Kocsis
5. F. Rasio
6. Joseph M. Antognini
7. S. Banerjee
8. F. Dosopoulou

In Geophysics

1. F. Antonini
2. S. Naoz
3. C. Petrovich

Citations in the corpus

• Greatly Enhanced Merger Rates of Compact-object Binaries in Non-spherical Nuclear Star Clusters (2017, methodology): “Effect from general relativistic precession It is well known that external sources of apsidal precession such as general relativistic precession can limit the maximum eccentricity growth of the LK oscillations (e.g., Blaes et al. 2002; Liu et al. 2015).”
• The Eccentric Kozai-Lidov Effect and Its Applications (2016, methodology): “nia, Los Angeles on June 16, 2015 http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from Figure 17 Maximum eccentricity in the presence of rotation (right panel) and tides (left panel). Figure adopted from Liu et al. (2015). Note that here we used the &quot;notation introduced in Liu et al. (2015), to avo”