Recoiling from a kick in the head-on collision of spinning black holes

Abstract

Recoil ``kicks'' induced by gravitational radiation are expected in the inspiral and merger of black holes. Recently the numerical relativity community has begun to measure the significant kicks found when both unequal masses and spins are considered. Because understanding the cause and magnitude of each component of this kick may be complicated in inspiral simulations, we consider these effects in the context of a simple test problem. We study recoils from collisions of binaries with initially head-on trajectories, starting with the simplest case of equal masses with no spin and then adding spin and varying the mass ratio, both separately and jointly. We find spin-induced recoils to be significant relative to unequal-mass recoils even in head-on configurations. Additionally, it appears that the scaling of transverse kicks with spins is consistent with post-Newtonian theory, even though the kick is generated in the nonlinear merger interaction, where post-Newtonian theory should not apply. This suggests that a simple heuristic description might be effective in the estimation of spin-kicks.

12 pages, 10 figures. Replaced with published version, including more discussion of convergence and properties of final hole

References in corpus (17)

• Large Merger Recoils and Spin Flips From Generic Black-Hole Binaries
• Inspiral, merger and ring-down of equal-mass black-hole binaries
• Total recoil: the maximum kick from nonspinning black-hole binary inspiral
• Supermassive recoil velocities for binary black-hole mergers with antialigned spins
• Binary black hole merger dynamics and waveforms
• How to move a black hole without excision: gauge conditions for the numerical evolution of a moving puncture
• Getting a kick out of numerical relativity
• Spin Flips and Precession in Black-Hole-Binary Mergers
• Binary black-hole evolutions of excision and puncture data
• The last orbit of binary black holes
• Gravitational Recoil during Binary Black Hole Coalescence using the Effective One Body Approach
• Modeling kicks from the merger of non-precessing black-hole binaries
• Binary black hole mergers: large kicks for generic spin orientations
• Binary Black Holes: Spin Dynamics and Gravitational Recoil
• Spin-orbit interactions in black-hole binaries
• Binary black hole late inspiral: Simulations for gravitational wave observations
• Beyond the Bowen-York extrinsic curvature for spinning black holes

Cited by in corpus (20)

• High-accuracy waveforms for binary black hole inspiral, merger, and ringdown
• Exploring black hole superkicks
• Binary-black-hole initial data with nearly-extremal spins
• Further insight into gravitational recoil
• Modeling kicks from the merger of non-precessing black-hole binaries
• Comparison of Numerical and Post-Newtonian Waveforms for Generic Precessing Black-Hole Binaries
• Foundations of multiple black hole evolutions
• Modeling gravitational recoil from precessing highly-spinning unequal-mass black-hole binaries
• Simulations of black-hole binaries with unequal masses or non-precessing spins: accuracy, physical properties, and comparison with post-Newtonian results
• Reducing spurious gravitational radiation in binary-black-hole simulations by using conformally curved initial data
• Modeling maximum astrophysical gravitational recoil velocities
• Accuracy Issues for Numerical Waveforms
• Modeling Gravitational Recoil Using Numerical Relativity
• Advances in Simulations of Generic Black-Hole Binaries
• NGC 6240 Supermassive Black Hole Binary dynamical evolution based on Chandra data
• Seeking for toroidal event horizons from initially stationary BH configurations
• Robustness of Binary Black Hole Mergers in the Presence of Spurious Radiation
• A Numerical Study of Boson Star Binaries
• Gravitational wave recoils in non-axisymmetric Robinson-Trautman spacetimes
• Accurate models for recoil velocity distribution in black hole mergers with comparable to extreme mass-ratios and their astrophysical implications