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Full-Text Articles in Physics

Consequences Of Gravitational Radiation Recoil, David Merritt, Miloš Milosavljević, Marc Favata, Scott A. Hughes, Daniel E. Holz May 2004

Consequences Of Gravitational Radiation Recoil, David Merritt, Miloš Milosavljević, Marc Favata, Scott A. Hughes, Daniel E. Holz

Department of Physics and Astronomy Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Coalescing binary black holes experience an impulsive kick from anisotropic emission of gravitational waves. Recoil velocities are sufficient to eject most coalescing black holes from dwarf galaxies and globular clusters, which may explain the apparent absence of massive black holes in these systems. Ejection from giant elliptical galaxies would be rare, but coalescing black holes are displaced from the center and fall back on a timescale of order the half-mass crossing time. Displacement of the black holes transfers energy to the stars in the nucleus and can convert a steep density cusp into a core. Radiation recoil calls into question …


How Black Holes Get Their Kicks: Gravitational Radiation Recoil Revisited, Marc Favata, Scott A. Hughes, Daniel E. Holz May 2004

How Black Holes Get Their Kicks: Gravitational Radiation Recoil Revisited, Marc Favata, Scott A. Hughes, Daniel E. Holz

Department of Physics and Astronomy Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Gravitational waves from the coalescence of binary black holes carry away linear momentum, causing center of mass recoil. This "radiation rocket" effect has important implications for systems with escape speeds of order the recoil velocity. We revisit this problem using black hole perturbation theory, treating the binary as a test mass spiraling into a spinning hole. For extreme ratios (q ≡ m1/m2 ≪ 1), we compute the recoil for the slow in-spiral epoch of binary coalescence very accurately; these results can be extrapolated to q ∼ 0.4 with modest accuracy. Although the recoil from the final plunge contributes significantly to …


Lisa Time-Delay Interferometry Zero-Signal Solution: Geometrical Properties, Massimo Tinto, Shane L. Larson Jan 2004

Lisa Time-Delay Interferometry Zero-Signal Solution: Geometrical Properties, Massimo Tinto, Shane L. Larson

All Physics Faculty Publications

Time-delay interferometry (TDI) is the data processing technique needed for generating interferometric combinations of data measured by the multiple Doppler readouts available onboard the three Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) spacecraft. Within the space of all possible interferometric combinations TDI can generate, we have derived a specific combination that has zero response to the gravitational wave signal, and called it the zero-signal solution (ZSS). This is a two-parameter family of linear combinations of the generators of the TDI space, and its response to a gravitational wave becomes null when these two parameters coincide with the values of the angles of …