Workshop From geometry to numerics
IHP, Paris, 20-24 November 2006
Carlos Lousto (Univ. Texas, Brownsville, USA)
Spin-orbit interactions in black-hole binaries
We present the first
fully-nonlinear numerical study of the dynamics of highly spinning
black-hole binaries. We evolve binaries from quasicircular orbits and
find that the last stages of the orbital motion of black-hole binaries
are profoundly affected by their individual spins. We consider two
equal mass holes with individual spin parameters S/m2=0.757,
both aligned and anti-aligned with the orbital angular momentum (and
compare with the spinless case), and with an initial orbital period
of 125M. We find that the aligned case completes three orbits
and merges significantly after the anti-aligned case, which
completes less than one orbit. By contrast, the spin-orbit coupling is
far too weak to tidally lock the binary to a corotating state during
the late-inspiral phase.
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