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Testing the Boundary-to-Bound Correspondence with Numerical Relativity
Anuj Kankani, Sean T. McWilliams
The Boundary-to-Bound (B2B) correspondence, which connects orbital and radiative observables between bound and unbound orbits, has recently been introduced and demonstrated in the…
Sensitivity of present and future detectors across the black-hole binary gravitational wave spectrum
Andrew R. Kaiser, Sean T. McWilliams
Black-holes are known to span at least 9 orders of magnitude in mass: from the stellar-mass objects observed by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory Scientific C…
Induced Spins from Scattering Experiments of Initially Nonspinning Black Holes
Patrick E. Nelson, Zachariah B. Etienne, Sean T. McWilliams +1
When two relativistically boosted, nonspinning black holes pass by one another on a scattering trajectory, we might expect the tidal interaction to spin up each black hole. We pres…
Analytical Black-Hole Binary Merger Waveforms
Sean T. McWilliams
We present a highly accurate, fully analytical model for the late inspiral, merger, and ringdown of black-hole binaries with arbitrary mass ratios and spin vectors, including the c…
Improving performance of SEOBNRv3 by 300x
Tyler D. Knowles, Caleb Devine, David A. Buch +4
When a gravitational wave is detected by Advanced LIGO/Virgo, sophisticated parameter estimation (PE) pipelines spring into action. These pipelines leverage approximants to generat…
GiRaFFE: An Open-Source General Relativistic Force-Free Electrodynamics Code
Zachariah B. Etienne, Mew-Bing Wan, Maria C. Babiuc +2
We present GiRaFFE, the first open-source general relativistic force-free electrodynamics (GRFFE) code for dynamical, numerical-relativity generated spacetimes. GiRaFFE adopts the…
GW150914: The Advanced LIGO Detectors in the Era of First Discoveries
The LIGO Scientific Collaboration, The Virgo Collaboration
Following a major upgrade, the two advanced detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) held their first observation run between September 2015 and…
A Proposed Search for the Detection of Gravitational Waves from Eccentric Binary Black Holes
Vaibhav Tiwari, Sergey Klimenko, Nelson Christensen +14
Most of compact binary systems are expected to circularize before the frequency of emitted gravitational waves (GWs) enters the sensitivity band of the ground based interferometric…
Constraining the Solution to the Last Parsec Problem with Pulsar Timing
Laura Sampson, Neil J. Cornish, Sean T. McWilliams
The detection of a stochastic gravitational-wave signal from the superposition of many inspiraling supermassive black holes with pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) is likely to occur with…
Stability of exact force-free electrodynamic solutions and scattering from spacetime curvature
Fan Zhang, Sean T. McWilliams, Harald P. Pfeiffer
Recently, a family of exact force-free electrodynamic (FFE) solutions was given by Brennan, Gralla and Jacobson, which generalizes earlier solutions by Michel, Menon and Dermer, an…
Accurate and efficient waveforms for compact binaries on eccentric orbits
E. A. Huerta, Prayush Kumar, Sean T. McWilliams +2
Compact binaries that emit gravitational waves in the sensitivity band of ground-based detectors can have non-negligible eccentricities just prior to merger, depending on the forma…
Detecting gravitational waves from highly eccentric compact binaries
Kai Sheng Tai, Sean T. McWilliams, Frans Pretorius
In dense stellar regions, highly eccentric binaries of black holes and neutron stars can form through various n-body interactions. Such a binary could emit a significant fraction o…
Self-forced evolutions of an implicit rotating source: A natural framework to model comparable and intermediate mass-ratio systems from inspiral through ringdown
E. A. Huerta, Prayush Kumar, Jonathan R. Gair +1
We develop a waveform model to describe the inspiral, merger and ringdown of binary systems with comparable and intermediate mass-ratios. This model incorporates first-order conser…
Reply to "Comment on `Black Holes are neither Particle Accelerators nor Dark Matter Probes' "
Sean T. McWilliams
We respond to a recent criticism from Zaslavskii (arXiv:1301.3429v2 [gr-qc]) of our article, which appeared in Phys. Rev. Lett. 110 011102 (2013). We clarify the points of apparent…
Black Holes are neither Particle Accelerators nor Dark Matter Probes
Sean T. McWilliams
It has been suggested that maximally spinning black holes can serve as particle accelerators, reaching arbitrarily high center-of-mass energies. Despite several objections regardin…
Binary Systems as Resonance Detectors for Gravitational Waves
Lam Hui, Sean T. McWilliams, I-Sheng Yang
Gravitational waves at suitable frequencies can resonantly interact with a binary system, inducing changes to its orbit. A stochastic gravitational-wave background causes the orbit…
Observing complete gravitational wave signals from dynamical capture binaries
William E. East, Sean T. McWilliams, Janna Levin +1
We assess the detectability of the gravitational wave signals from highly eccentric compact binaries. We use a simple model for the inspiral, merger, and ringdown of these systems.…
Low-frequency gravitational-wave science with eLISA/NGO
Pau Amaro-Seoane, Sofiane Aoudia, Stanislav Babak +27
We review the expected science performance of the New Gravitational-Wave Observatory (NGO, a.k.a. eLISA), a mission under study by the European Space Agency for launch in the early…
Mergers of black-hole binaries with aligned spins: Waveform characteristics
Bernard J. Kelly, John G. Baker, William D. Boggs +2
We conduct a descriptive analysis of the multipolar structure of gravitational-radiation waveforms from equal-mass aligned-spin mergers, following an approach first presented in th…
Sky localization of complete inspiral-merger-ringdown signals for nonspinning massive black hole binaries
Sean T. McWilliams, Ryan N. Lang, John G. Baker +1
We investigate the capability of LISA to measure the sky position of equal-mass, nonspinning black hole binaries, combining for the first time the entire inspiral-merger-ringdown s…
The Status of Black-Hole Binary Merger Simulations with Numerical Relativity
Sean T. McWilliams
The advent of long-term stability in numerical relativity has yielded a windfall of answers to long-standing questions regarding the dynamics of space-time, matter, and electromagn…
Inspiral of Generic Black Hole Binaries: Spin, Precession, and Eccentricity
Janna Levin, Sean T. McWilliams, Hugo Contreras
Given the absence of observations of black hole binaries, it is critical that the full range of accessible parameter space be explored in anticipation of future observation with gr…
Observing mergers of non-spinning black-hole binaries
Sean T. McWilliams, Bernard J. Kelly, John G. Baker
Advances in the field of numerical relativity now make it possible to calculate the final, most powerful merger phase of binary black-hole coalescence for generic binaries. The sta…
The Mock LISA Data Challenges: from Challenge 3 to Challenge 4
Stanislav Babak, John G. Baker, Matthew J. Benacquista +27
The Mock LISA Data Challenges are a program to demonstrate LISA data-analysis capabilities and to encourage their development. Each round of challenges consists of one or more data…