Integrability of eccentric, spinning black hole binaries up to second post-Newtonian order

Understand

Accurate and efficient modeling of the dynamics of binary black holes (BBHs) is crucial to their detection and parameter estimation through gravitational waves, both with LIGO/Virgo and LISA.

• General BBH configurations will have misaligned spins and eccentric orbits, eccentricity being particularly relevant at early times.
• Modeling these systems is both analytically and numerically challenging.
• Even though the 1.5 post-Newtonian (PN) order is Liouville integrable, numerical work has demonstrated chaos at 2PN order, which impedes the existence of an analytic solution.