Gravity Seminar: Extracting astrophysics from spin precession in binary black holes, Anuradha Gupta, University of Mississippi

One of the important parameters that can provide clues about the formation of binary black hole mergers detected by ground-based gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO and Virgo is the spin orientations of the black hole. Specifically, the spin tilts, i.e., the angles between the spin vector of each black hole and the binary orbital angular momentum vector can change due to precessional effects as the black holes evolve from a large separation to their merger. The tilts one infers by comparing the signal in the sensitive band of the detectors with theoretical waveforms can thus be significantly different from when the binary originally formed. Moreover, the precessional motion of binary black holes can be classified into different morphologies which can be related to the binary’s formation channel. Measuring spin parameters accurately can then be consequential in constraining those morphologies. In this talk, I’ll discuss some of my group’s recent work that deals with spin precession dynamics in binary black holes. All these works have the same goal: exploiting spin precession dynamics of binary black holes to understand their formation pathways.