Tidal heating of black holes in a binary and its imprints on the gravitational waveform models

by Mukherjee Samanwaya (IUCAA)

Friday 17 Nov 2023, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Berlin

Abbeanum /Groundfloor SR 102 (TPI, FSU Jena)

Being subject to the tidal field of its companion, each component of a coalescing binary suffers a slow change in its mass (tidal heating) and spin (tidal torquing) during the inspiral and merger. If the component objects are black holes, this effect is the most pronounced because of their horizons' 'one-way' nature, whereas for neutron stars or other exotic compact objects, it is less significant. This finite-size effect, then, can be a potential tool to tell apart black holes from neutron stars in the mass-gap region or from hypothetical black-hole mimickers, which can, in principle, resemble black holes in a binary. During the late inspiral phase, where numerical relativity has to be invoked for sufficient accuracy, energy and angular momentum fluxes down the horizons are the strongest – necessitating their inclusion in complete gravitational waveform models. In this talk, I will discuss the viability of tidal heating as a black hole identifier and its effects on a complete waveform model for binary black holes spanning the inspiral, merger and ringdown regimes.