Black Hole Spin Axis in Numerical Relativity

Abstract

Colliding black holes are systems of profound interest in both gravitational wave astronomy and in gravitation theory, and a variety of methods have been developed for modeling their dynamics in detail. The features of these dynamics are determined by the masses of the holes and by the magnitudes and axes of their spins. While masses and spin magnitudes can be defined in reasonably unambiguous ways, the spin axis is a concept which despite great physical importance is seriously undermined by the coordinate freedom of general relativity. Despite a great wealth of detailed numerical simulations of generic spinning black hole collisions, very little attention has gone into defining or justifying the definitions of the spin axis used in the numerical relativity literature. In this paper, we summarize and contrast the various spin direction measures available in the SpEC code, including a comparison with a method common in other codes, we explain why these measures have shown qualitatively different nutation features than one would expect from post-Newtonian theory, and we derive and implement new measures that give much better agreement.

21 pages, 14 figures. Version 2 is a substantial revision, with a much better treatment of rotation generators. Version 2 submitted to PRD

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• The SXS Collaboration catalog of binary black hole simulations
• Phenomenological model for the gravitational-wave signal from precessing binary black holes with two-spin effects
• The SXS Collaboration's third catalog of binary black hole simulations
• Comparing Remnant Properties from Horizon Data and Asymptotic Data in Numerical Relativity
• Gravitational wave surrogate model for spinning, intermediate mass ratio binaries based on perturbation theory and numerical relativity
• Up-down instability of binary black holes in numerical relativity
• Actions of spinning compact binaries: Spinning particle in Kerr matched to dynamics at 1.5 post-Newtonian order
• Testing gravitational waveform models using angular momentum
• Horizons as boundary conditions in spherical symmetry
• Parameter control for binary black hole initial data