Systematics of black hole binary inspiral kicks and the slowness approximation

Abstract

During the inspiral and merger of black holes, the interaction of gravitational wave multipoles carries linear momentum away, thereby providing an astrophysically important recoil, or "kick" to the system and to the final black hole remnant. It has been found that linear momentum during the last stage (quasinormal ringing) of the collapse tends to provide an "antikick" that in some cases cancels almost all the kick from the earlier (quasicircular inspiral) emission. We show here that this cancellation is not due to peculiarities of gravitational waves, black holes, or interacting multipoles, but simply to the fact that the rotating flux of momentum changes its intensity slowly. We show furthermore that an understanding of the systematics of the emission allows good estimates of the net kick for numerical simulations started at fairly late times, and is useful for understanding qualitatively what kinds of systems provide large and small net kicks.

15 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables

References in corpus (5)

• Gravitational Recoil during Binary Black Hole Coalescence using the Effective One Body Approach
• Anatomy of the binary black hole recoil: A multipolar analysis
• Understanding the "anti-kick" in the merger of binary black holes
• EM counterparts of recoiling black holes: general relativistic simulations of non-Keplerian discs
• Binary black hole merger gravitational waves and recoil in the large mass ratio limit

Cited by in corpus (3)

• The antikick strikes back: recoil velocities for nearly-extremal binary black hole mergers in the test-mass limit
• Accurate models for recoil velocity distribution in black hole mergers with comparable to extreme mass-ratios and their astrophysical implications
• High Accuracy Gravitational Waveforms from Black Hole Binary Inspirals Using OpenCL