Small mass plunging into a Kerr black hole: Anatomy of the 
inspiral-merger-ringdown waveforms

Taracchini, Andrea; Buonanno, A.; Khanna, Gaurav; Hughes, Scott A.

doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.90.084025

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Add to Basket

Release HistoryDetailsSummary

Released

Journal Article

Small mass plunging into a Kerr black hole: Anatomy of the inspiral-merger-ringdown waveforms

MPS-Authors

/persons/resource/persons127862

Buonanno, A.
Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity, AEI-Golm, MPI for Gravitational Physics, Max Planck Society;

External Resource

No external resources are shared

Fulltext (restricted access)

There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.

Fulltext (public)

1404.1819.pdf
(Preprint), 3MB

PhysRevD.90_084025.pdf
(Any fulltext), 2MB

Supplementary Material (public)

There is no public supplementary material available

Citation

Taracchini, A., Buonanno, A., Khanna, G., & Hughes, S. A. (2014). Small mass plunging into a Kerr black hole: Anatomy of the inspiral-merger-ringdown waveforms. Physical Review D, 90: 084025. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.90.084025.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0023-F996-5

Abstract

We numerically solve the Teukolsky equation in the time domain to obtain the gravitational-wave emission of a small mass inspiraling and plunging into the equatorial plane of a Kerr black hole. We account for the dissipation of orbital energy using the Teukolsky frequency-domain gravitational-wave fluxes for circular, equatorial orbits, down to the light-ring. We consider Kerr spins $-0.99 \leq q \leq 0.99$, and compute the inspiral-merger-ringdown (2,2), (2,1), (3,3), (3,2), (4,4), and (5,5) modes. We study the large-spin regime, and find a great simplicity in the merger waveforms, thanks to the extremely circular character of the plunging orbits. We also quantitatively examine the mixing of quasinormal modes during the ringdown, which induces complicated amplitude and frequency modulations in the waveforms. Finally, we explain how the study of small mass-ratio black-hole binaries helps extending effective-one-body models for comparable-mass, spinning black-hole binaries to any mass ratio and spin magnitude.