Carlos O. Lousto

Accurate evolutions of orbiting black-hole binaries without excision

We present a new algorithm for evolving orbiting black-hole binaries that does not require excision or a corotating shift. Our algorithm is based on a novel technique to handle the singular puncture conformal factor. This system, based on the Baumgarte-Shapiro-Shibata-Nakamura formulation of Einsteins equations, when used with a precollapsed initial lapse, is nonsingular at the start of the evolution and remains nonsingular and stable provided that a good choice is made for the gauge. As a test case, we use this technique to fully evolve orbiting black-hole binaries from near the innermost stable circular orbit regime. We show fourth-order convergence of waveforms and compute the radiated gravitational energy and angular momentum from the plunge. These results are in good agreement with those predicted by the Lazarus approach.

Spinning-black-hole binaries : The orbital hang-up

We present the first fully-nonlinear numerical study of the dynamics of highly-spinning-black-hole binaries. We evolve binaries from quasicircular orbits (as inferred from post-Newtonian theory), and find that the last stages of the orbital motion of black-hole binaries are profoundly affected by their individual spins. In order to cleanly display its effects, we consider two equal-mass holes with individual spin parameters

Modeling gravitational radiation from coalescing binary black holes

S/{m}^{2}=0.757

Last orbit of binary black holes

, both aligned and antialigned with the orbital angular momentum (and compare with the spinless case), and with an initial orbital period of

Spin-orbit interactions in black-hole binaries

125M

The Emergence of an effective two-dimensional quantum description from the study of critical phenomena in black holes

. We find that the aligned case completes three orbits and merges significantly after the antialigned case, which completes less than one orbit. The total energy radiated for the former case is

Back reaction effects in black hole spacetimes

ensuremath{approx}7%

Computing the gravitational self-force on a compact object plunging into a Schwarzschild black hole

while for the latter it is only

The fourth law of black-hole thermodynamics

ensuremath{approx}2%

Reconstruction of Black Hole Metric Perturbations from Weyl Curvature

. The final Kerr hole remnants have rotation parameters