Studies of the Extreme Dynamics of Black Hole Binaries

引力波天文学有望提供一个革命性的新的宇宙观，可以探测以前未被探索的区域，包括中子星的内部，黑洞的碰撞，它们发出的能量超过整个可见宇宙的亮度，甚至是大爆炸的残余。 为了获得对宇宙动力学的新见解，引力波天文学家需要能够从观测到的信号中推断出源的性质。如果已知波形对源参数的依赖性具有足够高的精度，则可以从观测信号中提取这些源的物理参数。因此，引力波天文学研究的成功关键取决于数值相对论的进步，特别是现在aLIGO已经上线。该奖项支持的主要目标是为aLIGO源参数化工作产生波形，并对高旋进旋转黑洞双星（BHB）的残余质量、自旋、光度和引力反冲进行建模，以阐明它们的分布，以及反冲如何影响超大质量黑洞的分布和生长。这项研究还将补充RIT小组的其他正在进行的项目，旨在研究电磁（EM）对应的紧凑物体合并，并通过在BHB时空中包含物质和EM场来模拟超大质量黑洞附近的吸积盘动力学。

Gravitational Wave Astronomy promises to provide a revolutionary new view of the universe that can probe previously unexplored regions, including the interiors of neutron stars, collisions of black holes, which emit energy at luminosities exceeding the entire visible universe, and even remnants of the big bang. To gain new insight into the dynamics of the universe, gravitational wave astronomers need to be able to infer the nature of the sources from the observed signals. The physical parameters of these sources can be extracted from the observed signals if the dependence of the waveform on source parameters is known to sufficiently high accuracy. The success of the gravitational wave astronomy efforts therefore depends critically on advancements in Numerical Relativity, especially now that aLIGO is online.The principal goals supported by this award are to produce waveforms for aLIGO source parameterization efforts, and to model the remnant mass, spin, luminosity, and gravitational recoil from highly-precessing spinning black hole binaries (BHBs) in order to elucidate their distributions, and also how recoils affect the distribution and growth of supermassive black holes. This research will also complement other ongoing projects of the RIT group aimed at studying electromagnetic (EM) counterparts to compact-object mergers and to model accretion disk dynamics near supermassive black holes via the inclusion of matter and EM fields in BHBs spacetimes.