Inspiral, merger and ringdown of unequal mass black hole binaries: a multipolar analysis

TL;DR

This study analyzes unequal mass black hole binary mergers through numerical simulations and compares them with Post-Newtonian predictions, revealing insights into waveform multipolar structure, energy emission, and ringdown characteristics.

Contribution

It provides a detailed multipolar analysis of unequal mass black hole mergers, including waveform comparisons, energy scaling laws, and methods for estimating final black hole parameters.

Findings

Post-Newtonian predictions match waveform amplitude-frequency relations well

Higher multipoles carry more energy as mass ratio q increases

Ringdown parameter estimates vary with resolution but align with energy and momentum conservation

Abstract

We study the inspiral, merger and ringdown of unequal mass black hole binaries by analyzing a catalogue of numerical simulations for seven different values of the mass ratio (from q=M2/M1=1 to q=4). We compare numerical and Post-Newtonian results by projecting the waveforms onto spin-weighted spherical harmonics, characterized by angular indices (l,m). We find that the Post-Newtonian equations predict remarkably well the relation between the wave amplitude and the orbital frequency for each (l,m), and that the convergence of the Post-Newtonian series to the numerical results is non-monotonic. To leading order the total energy emitted in the merger phase scales like eta^2 and the spin of the final black hole scales like eta, where eta=q/(1+q)^2 is the symmetric mass ratio. We study the multipolar distribution of the radiation, finding that odd-l multipoles are suppressed in the equal mass limit. Higher multipoles carry a larger fraction of the total energy as q increases. We introduce and compare three different definitions for the ringdown starting time. Applying linear estimation methods (the so-called Prony methods) to the ringdown phase, we find resolution-dependent time variations in the fitted parameters of the final black hole. By cross-correlating information from different multipoles we show that ringdown fits can be used to obtain precise estimates of the mass and spin of the final black hole, which are in remarkable agreement with energy and angular momentum balance calculations.