Cosmology, Relativity, and Gravity Commons^™

Topics In The Detection Of Gravitational Waves From Compact Binary Inspirals, Shasvath Jagat Kapadia

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Orbiting compact binaries - such as binary black holes, binary neutron stars and neutron star-black hole binaries - are among the most promising sources of gravitational waves observable by ground-based interferometric detectors. Despite numerous sophisticated engineering techniques, the gravitational wave signals will be buried deep within noise generated by various instrumental and environmental processes, and need to be extracted via a signal processing technique referred to as matched filtering.

Matched filtering requires large banks of signal templates that are faithful representations of the true gravitational waveforms produced by astrophysical binaries. The accurate and efficient production of templates is thus crucial …

Exploring The Possibility Of Floating Orbits For Extreme Mass Ratio Binary Black Holes, Shasvath Jagat Kapadia

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A binary black hole system, where each black hole orbits the system's center of mass, loses energy by emission of gravitational waves. This causes both black holes to spiral in towards each other. However, if the binary were to, by some mechanism, gain orbital energy at the same rate that it radiates away this energy, a non-decaying or “floating” orbit would result. The thesis uses superradiant scattering and tidal friction, which are two equivalent ways of looking at a process by which the system can gain orbital energy from the spin energy of either black hole, to determine the possibility …