2007/07/31 by Jeremy D. Schnittman, Alessandra Buonanno, James R. van Meter +6 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #astro-ph #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.77.044031
published as Phys.Rev.D77:044031,2008 · 28 pages, 20 figures, submitted to PRD; v2: minor revisions from referee report
arxiv created 2007/12/20 · openalex publication_date 2008/02/19 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
We present a multipolar analysis of the gravitational recoil computed in recent numerical simulations of binary black hole coalescence, for both unequal masses and nonzero, nonprecessing spins. We show that multipole moments up to and including \ensuremathℓ=4 are sufficient to accurately reproduce the final recoil velocity (within \ensuremath≃2%) and that only a few dominant modes contribute significantly to it (within \ensuremath≃5%). We describe how the relative amplitudes, and more importantly, the relative phases, of these few modes control the way in which the recoil builds up throughout the inspiral, merger, and ringdown phases. We also find that the numerical results can be reproduced by an ``effective Newtonian'' formula for the multipole moments obtained by replacing the radial separation in the Newtonian formulas with an effective radius computed from the numerical data. Beyond the merger, the numerical results are reproduced by a superposition of three Kerr quasinormal modes. Analytic formulas, obtained by expressing the multipole moments in terms of the fundamental quasinormal modes of a Kerr black hole, are able to explain the onset and amount of ``antikick'' for each of the simulations. Lastly, we apply this multipolar analysis to help explain the remarkable difference between the amplitudes of planar and nonplanar kicks for equal-mass spinning black holes.