layout: pub-link
title: "Black-hole kicks from numerical-relativity surrogate models"
modified: 2018-05-25
categories: pubs
excerpt: "Modeling black holes' kicks directly from numerical relativity"
tags: [general relativity, gravity, black holes, python, code, surrogate]
pub:
  authors: "Davide Gerosa, François Hébert, and Leo C. Stein"
  doi: "10.1103/PhysRevD.97.104049"
  arXiv: "1802.04276"
  jref: "Phys. Rev. D <b>97</b>, 104049 (2018)"
date: 2018-02-13
---

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> Binary black holes radiate linear momentum in gravitational waves as
> they merge. Recoils imparted to the black-hole remnant can reach
> thousands of km/s, thus ejecting black holes from their host
> galaxies. We exploit recent advances in gravitational waveform
> modeling to quickly and reliably extract recoils imparted to
> generic, precessing, black hole binaries. Our procedure uses a
> numerical-relativity surrogate model to obtain the gravitational
> waveform given a set of binary parameters, then from this waveform
> we directly integrate the gravitational-wave linear momentum
> flux. This entirely bypasses the need of fitting formulae which are
> typically used to model black-hole recoils in astrophysical
> contexts. We provide a thorough exploration of the black-hole kick
> phenomenology in the parameter space, summarizing and extending
> previous numerical results on the topic. Our extraction procedure is
> made publicly available as a module for the Python programming
> language named surrkick. Kick evaluations take ∼0.1s on a standard
> off-the-shelf machine, thus making our code ideal to be ported to
> large-scale astrophysical studies.
