Exploring black hole superkicks

Abstract

Recent calculations of the recoil velocity in black-hole binary mergers have found kick velocities of $\approx 2500$km/s for equal-mass binaries with anti-aligned 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 $(l=2,m=\pm 2)$ modes of ${\Psi }_4$, 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 $(l=2,m=\pm 2)$ asymmetry in the gravitational wave signal for the angular dependence of the SNR and the mismatch of the gravitational wave signals corresponding to the north and south poles.

References in corpus (4)

• Where post-Newtonian and numerical-relativity waveforms meet
• Binary Black Holes: Spin Dynamics and Gravitational Recoil
• Reducing eccentricity in black-hole binary evolutions with initial parameters from post-Newtonian inspiral
• Dealing with delicate issues in waveforms calculations

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Hyperboloidal foliations and scri-fixing
• Comparison between numerical-relativity and post-Newtonian waveforms from spinning binaries: the orbital hang-up case
• Extra-Large Remnant Recoil Velocities and Spins from Near-Extremal-Bowen-York-Spin Black-Hole Binaries
• Multipolar analysis of spinning binaries
• BSSN in Spherical Symmetry
• The Yamabe invariant for axially symmetric two Kerr black holes initial data
• Binary Black Hole Coalescence