BLACK HOLE TRIPLE DYNAMICS: A BREAKDOWN OF THE ORBIT AVERAGE APPROXIMATION AND IMPLICATIONS FOR GRAVITATIONAL WAVE DETECTIONS

By F. Antonini, N. Murray, S. Mikkola. 2013

144 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Coalescing black hole (BH) binaries forming in the dense core of globular clusters (GCs) are expected to be one of the brightest sources of gravitational wave (GW) radiation for the next generation of ground-based laser interferometers. Favorable conditions for a merger are initiated by the Kozai resonance in which the gravitational interaction with a third distant object, typically another BH, induces quasi-periodic variations of the inner BH binary eccentricity. In this article we perform high precision three-body simulations of the long-term evolution of hierarchical BH triples and investigate the conditions that lead to the merging of the BH binary and the way it might become an observable source of GW radiation. We find that the secular orbit average treatment, which was adopted in previous works, does not reliably describe the dynamics of these systems if the binary is orbited by the outer BH on a highly inclined orbit at a moderate distance. We show that 50% of coalescing BH binaries driven by the Kozai mechanism in GCs will have eccentricities larger than 0.1, with 10% of them being extremely eccentric, (1 − e) ≲ 10−4, when they first chirp in the frequency band of ground-based laser interferometers. This implies that a large fraction of such GW sources could be missed if conventional quasi-circular templates are used for analysis of GW detector data. The efficient detection of all coalescing BH binaries in GCs will therefore require template banks of eccentric inspiral waveforms for matched-filtering and dedicated search strategies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ee8143274ceca472905773c625434235beb2445a

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

The Eccentric Kozai-Lidov Effect and Its Applications (2016, background): “o orbital ips for the inner binary for comparable masses. Figure adopted from Naoz et al. (2013b) the system can reach. Assuming a xed outer perturber and adopting an instantaneous quadrupole torque, Antonini et al. (2014) took the limit of e 1 !1 and found a simple form to the condition for which t”
Timescales of Kozai-Lidov oscillations at quadrupole and octupole order in the test particle limit (2015, background): “2002; Wen 2003), the distribution of dark matter around supermassive black hole binaries (Naoz & Silk 2014), and as a source of unique gravitational wave signals (Miller & Hamilton 2002a; Gould 2011; Seto 2013; Antonini et al. 2014; Antognini et al. 2014; Bode & Wegg 2014).”