3 years ago

# Wide precession: binary black-hole spins repeatedly oscillating from full alignment to full anti-alignment.

Davide Gerosa, Alicia Lima, Emanuele Berti, Ulrich Sperhake, Michael Kesden, Richard O'shaughnessy

Within the framework of 2PN black-hole binary spin precession, we explore configurations where one of the two spins oscillates from being completely aligned with the orbital angular momentum to being completely anti-aligned with it during a single precession cycle. This "wide precession" is the extreme limit of the generic phenomenon of spin nutation in black-hole binaries. Crucially, wide precession happens on the short precession time scale and it is not a secular effect due to gravitational-wave radiation reaction. The spins of these binaries, therefore, flip repeatedly as one of these special configurations is entered. Binaries with total mass $M$, mass ratio $q$, and dimensionless spin $\chi_1$ ($\chi_2$) of the more (less) massive black hole are allowed to undergo wide precession at binary separations $r \leq r_{\rm wide} \equiv [(q \chi_2 - \chi_1)/(1-q)]^2 M$. Sources that are more likely to precess widely have similar masses and effective spins close to zero.

Publisher URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/1811.05979

DOI: arXiv:1811.05979v1

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