Wide nutation: binary black-hole spins repeatedly oscillating from full alignment to full anti-alignment
Published:
Latest in the series of our spin-precession papers, here we found a thing that was worthy of a new name: wide nutation(we had wide precession before, but this is better). These are black-hole binary configurations where the angle between any of the two spins and the orbital angular momentum changes a lot. Can’t change more actually: spins goes from full alignment to full anti-alignment. And they do it many times.
ps. We found this wide precession during Alicia’s SURF undergraduate summer project at Caltech. Jackpot!
Davide Gerosa , Alicia Lima, Emanuele Berti, Ulrich Sperhake, Michael Kesden, Richard O’Shaughnessy.
Classical and Quantum Gravity 36 (2019) 10, 105003.
arXiv:1811.05979 [gr-qc].
Supporting material available here.