Proceedings

PRECESSION 2.1: black-hole binary spin precession on eccentric orbits

We were asked to submit a short document to the proceedings of the 24th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation (GR24) and the 16th Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves (Amaldi16), and we thought this was the perfect occasion to advertise a new major release of our PRECESSION code (github.com/dgerosa/precession). The code was fully generalized to eccentric orbits using results from this paper; Giulia also wrote a new orbit-averaged integrator. PRECESSION is now 10 years old, and stay tuned because we’re planning for more!

G. Fumagalli, D. Gerosa, N. Loutrel.
arXiv:2508.21125 [gr-qc].

Coincident morphological transitions in precessing black-hole binaries

We got back to spin morphologies, which is something we found almost 10 years ago (here!). That’s a neat (IMO at least) way to classify the dynamics of black hole binaries using the qualitative evolution of their spins. Once can have transitions between these mutually exclusive classes of solutions. Here we systematically look at all configurations where two transitions take place concurrently. While restrictive, but it turns out these configurations can all be computed analytically at 2PN. This short paper came out of Giulia Foroni’s BSc project, it’s a fun calculation!

D. Gerosa, G. Foroni, G. Fumagalli, E. Berti.
ICBS proceedings. arXiv:2508.19735 [gr-qc].

QLUSTER: quick clusters of merging binary black holes

We’ve got the best name ever for a numerical code! Let me introduce QLUSTER which, guess what, simulates clusters. We finally put out a piece of code that was originally developed for this paper in 2019 and later used in several other papers. It’s a very very simple treatment of black-hole binary formation in dense stellar environments, with the goal of predicting gravitational waves from repeated mergers. The code is available at github.com/mdmould/qluster and a short description is provided in the proceedings of the 2023 edition of the amazing Moriond conference.

D. Gerosa, M. Mould.
Moriond proceedings. arXiv:2305.04987 [astro-ph.HE].
Open source code.

Reanalysis of LIGO black-hole coalescences with alternative prior assumptions

These are proceedings of the IAU Symposium 338 “Gravitational Wave Astrophysics”, held in Baton Rouge LA on October 16-19, 2017. My contribution is based on arXiv:1707.04637, where we look at the first binary black hole data using different Bayesian priors. During that conference, we had the announcement of the first neutron start event, GW170817, and I was presenting black-hole science: so obsolete…

D. Gerosa, S. Vitale, C.-J. Haster, K. Chatziioannou, A. Zimmerman.
IAU Proceedigs 338 (2018) 22-28. arXiv:1712.06635 [astro-ph.HE].

Surprises from the spins: astrophysics and relativity with detections of spinning black-hole mergers

These are my proceedings for the 12th Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves (July 9-14, 2017, Pasadena CA). I summarize how to use black-hole spin dynamics to learn about the lives of stars using gravitational-wave data. There are surprises…

Before the talk, I was awarded the 2016 Stefano Braccini Thesis prize.

D. Gerosa.
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 957 (2018) 1, 012014. arXiv:1711.10038 [astro-ph.HE].

filltex: Automatic queries to ADS and INSPIRE databases to fill LaTex bibliography

My little latex project to compile bibliographies in a smart way was published by JOSS. I really liked JOSS: it’s an innovative way to get recognition for your carefully crafted software, encouraging open science and good code practice. It’s really about publishing your code, not a paper that describes the code: they peer-review the repository, openly with pull requests.

D. Gerosa, M. Vallisneri.
Journal of Open Source Software 2 (2017) 13.
Open source code.