Unstable flip-flopping spinning binary black holes

Abstract

We give a unified description of the flip-flop effect in spinning binary black holes and the anti-alignment instability in terms of real and imaginary flip-flop frequencies. We find that this instability is only effective for mass ratios $0.5<q<1$. We provide analytic expressions that determine the region of parameter space for which the instability occurs in terms of maps of the mass ratio and spin magnitudes $(q,{\alpha }_1,{\alpha }_2)$. This restricts the priors of parameter estimation techniques for the observation of gravitational waves from binary black holes and it is relevant for astrophysical modeling and final recoil computations of such binary systems.

5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
• Analysis of spin precession in binary black hole systems including quadrupole-monopole interaction
• Alignment of the spins of supermassive black holes prior to coalescence
• Hamiltonian of two spinning compact bodies with next-to-leading order gravitational spin-orbit coupling
• Remnant mass, spin, and recoil from spin aligned black-hole binaries
• Precessional instability in binary black holes with aligned spins
• Spin flips in generic black hole binaries
• Flip-flopping binary black holes

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• Relativistic gas accretion onto supermassive black Hole binaries from inspiral through merger
• Inferring spin tilts of binary black holes at formation with plus-era gravitational wave detectors
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• Spin and quadrupolar effects in the secular evolution of precessing compact binaries with black hole, neutron star, gravastar, or boson star components
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