Precessional dynamics of black hole triples: binary mergers with near-zero effective spin

Abstract

The binary black hole mergers detected by Advanced LIGO/Virgo have shown no evidence of large black hole spins. However, because LIGO/Virgo best measures the effective combination of the two spins along the orbital angular momentum (${\chi }_{\mathrm{eff}}$), it is difficult to distinguish between binaries with slowly-spinning black holes and binaries with spins lying in the orbital plane. Here, we study the spin dynamics for binaries with a distant black hole companion. For spins initially aligned with the orbital angular momentum of the binary, we find that ${\chi }_{\mathrm{eff}}$ "freezes" near zero as the orbit decays through the emission of gravitational waves. Through a population study, we show that this process predominantly leads to merging black hole binaries with near-zero ${\chi }_{\mathrm{eff}}$. We conclude that if the detected black hole binaries were formed in triples, then this would explain their low ${\chi }_{\mathrm{eff}}$ without the need to invoke near-zero spins or initially large spin-orbit angles.

6 pages, 4 figure. Letter accepted for publication in MNRAS

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