Gravitational Wave Beacons

Understand

We explore spinning, precessing, unequal mass binary black holes to display the long term orbital angular momentum, $\vec{L}$, flip dynamics.

• We study two prototypical cases of binaries with mass ratios $q=1/7$ and $q=1/15$ and a misaligned spin of the large black hole (with an intrinsic spin magnitude of $S_2/m_2^2=0.85$).
• We conduct full numerical simulations, for nearly 14 and 18 orbits respectively, to evolve the binary down to merger and display a full $L$-flip cycle.
• The pattern of radiation of such systems is particularly interesting, displaying strong polarization-dependent variation of amplitudes at precessional frequencies, leading to distinctive observational consequences for ground, space, and pulsar timing based gravitational wave detectors.