paper

Pseudospectrum and binary black hole merger transients

arXiv:2206.08025 · doi:10.1088/1361-6382/ac8ddc

Abstract

The merger phase of binary black hole coalescences is a transient between an initial oscillating regime (inspiral) and a late exponentially damped phase (ringdown). In spite of the non-linear character of Einstein equations, the merger dynamics presents a surprisingly simple behaviour consistent with effective linearity. On the other hand, energy loss through the event horizon and by scattering to infinity renders the system non-conservative. Hence, the infinitesimal generator of the (effective) linear dynamics is a non-selfadjoint operator. Qualitative features of transients in linear dynamics driven by non-selfadjoint (in general, non-normal) operators are captured by the pseudospectrum of the time generator. We propose the pseudospectrum as a unifying framework to thread together the phases of binary black hole coalescences, from the inspiral-merger transition up to the late quasinormal mode ringdown.

arXiv comment18 pages, 1 figure

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