Observability of spin precession in the presence of a black-hole remnant kick

TL;DR

This study shows that the imprint of black-hole remnant kicks in gravitational-wave signals can enhance the measurement of spin precession, especially in equal-mass, face-on binary systems, improving parameter estimation with current detectors.

Contribution

It demonstrates that remnant kicks induce asymmetries that make spin precession detectable in signals previously considered nearly unobservable in such configurations.

Findings

Large kicks correlate with large asymmetries in signals.

Asymmetries provide more structure, improving spin and mass ratio measurements.

Precession becomes detectable in equal-mass, face-on binaries due to kicks.

Abstract

Remnants of binary black-hole mergers can gain significant recoil or kick velocities when the binaries are asymmetric. The kick is the consequence of anisotropic emission of gravitational waves, which may leave a characteristic imprint in the observed signal. So far, only one gravitational-wave event supports a non-zero kick velocity: GW200129_065458. This signal is also the first to show evidence for spin-precession. For most other gravitational-wave observations, spin orientations are poorly constrained as this would require large signal-to-noise ratios, unequal mass ratios or inclined systems. Here we investigate whether the imprint of the kick can help to extract more information about the spins. We perform an injection and recovery study comparing binary black-hole signals with significantly different kick magnitudes, but the same spin magnitudes and spin tilts. To exclude the impact of higher signal harmonics in parameter estimation, we focus on equal-mass binaries that are oriented face-on. We generate signals with PhenomXO4a, which includes mode asymmetries. These asymmetries are the main cause for the kick in precessing binaries. For comparison with an equivalent model without asymmetries, we repeat the same injections with PhenomXPHM. We find that signals with large kicks necessarily include large asymmetries, and these give more structure to the signal, leading to more informative measurements of the spins and mass ratio. Our results also complement previous findings that argued precession in equal-mass, face-on or face-away binaries is nearly impossible to identify. In contrast, we find that in the presence of a remnant kick, even those signals become more informative and allow determining precession with signal-to-noise ratios observable already by current gravitational-wave detectors.