Black Hole Mergers Induced by Tidal Encounters with a Galactic Centre Black Hole

Understand

We discuss the properties of stellar mass black hole (BH) mergers induced by tidal encounters with a massive BH at galactic centres or potentially in dense star clusters.

• The tidal disruption of stellar binaries by a massive BH is known to produce hypervelocity stars.
• However, such a tidal encounter does not always lead to the break-up of binaries.
• Since surviving binaries tend to become hard and eccentric, this process can produce BH mergers in principle.