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arXiv · 0812.4413

Recoil velocity at 2PN order for spinning black hole binaries

Etienne Racine·Alessandra Buonanno·Lawrence E. Kidder
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Abstract

We compute the flux of linear momentum carried by gravitational waves emitted from spinning binary black holes at 2PN order for generic orbits. In particular we provide explicit expressions of three new types of terms, namely next-to-leading order spin-orbit terms at 1.5 PN order, spin-orbit tail terms at 2PN order, and spin-spin terms at 2PN order. Restricting ourselves to quasi-circular orbits, we integrate the linear momentum flux over time to obtain the recoil velocity as function of orbital frequency. We find that in the so-called superkick configuration the higher-order spin corrections can increase the recoil velocity up to about a factor 3 with respect to the leading-order PN prediction. Furthermore, we provide expressions valid for generic orbits, and accurate at 2PN order, for the energy and angular momentum carried by gravitational waves emitted from spinning binary black holes. Specializing to quasi-circular orbits we compute the spin-spin terms at 2PN order in the expression for the evolution of the orbital frequency and found agreement with Mikóczi, Vasúth and Gergely. We also verified that in the limit of extreme mass ratio our expressions for the energy and angular momentum fluxes match the ones of Tagoshi, Shibata, Tanaka and Sasaki obtained in the context of black hole perturbation theory.

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Etienne Racine, Alessandra Buonanno, Lawrence E. Kidder. 2009-10-26. Recoil velocity at 2PN order for spinning black hole binaries. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.80.044010

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