0000000000096611
AUTHOR
Daniel Pook-kolb
Horizons in a binary black hole merger II: Fluxes, multipole moments and stability
We study in detail the dynamics and stability of marginally trapped surfaces during a binary black hole merger. This is the second in a two-part study. The first part studied the basic geometric aspects of the world tubes traced out by the marginal surfaces and the status of the area increase law. Here we continue and study the dynamics of the horizons during the merger, again for the head-on collision of two non-spinning black holes. In particular we follow the spectrum of the stability operator during the course of the merger for all the horizons present in the problem and implement systematic spectrum statistics for its analysis. We also study more physical aspects of the merger, namely …
Horizons in a binary black hole merger I: Geometry and area increase
Recent advances in numerical relativity have revealed how marginally trapped surfaces behave when black holes merge. It is now known that interesting topological features emerge during the merger, and marginally trapped surfaces can have self-intersections. This paper presents the most detailed study yet of the physical and geometric aspects of this scenario. For the case of a head-on collision of non-spinning black holes, we study in detail the world tube formed by the evolution of marginally trapped surfaces. In the first of this two-part study, we focus on geometrical properties of the dynamical horizons, i.e. the world tube traced out by the time evolution of marginally outer trapped su…