Building a bridge between comparable and extreme mass ratio black hole binaries: a single spin precessing model for the final state

Understand

Modelling the gravitational wave signal from binaries beyond comparable mass is an important open issue in gravitational wave astronomy.

• For non-spinning binaries and when the spins are aligned with the orbital angular momentum, some first studies concerning the transition between the comparable and extreme mass ratio regime are already available, which suggest that extreme mass ratio results at times extrapolate to comparable mass ratios with surprising precision.
• Here we study the case of misaligned spins: We present new NR simulations performed with the Einstein Toolkit code at mass ratios up to 18 and construct a heterogeneous dataset that spans all mass ratios, including data from NR simulations, numerical approximations to extreme mass ratio binaries, and data from the geodesic approximation.
• As a first application we provide fits for the remnant mass and spin magnitude in single spin precessing systems, omitting consideration of the in-plane spin orientation.