TY - JOUR

T1 - Ultimate fate of apparent horizons during a binary black hole merger. I. Locating and understanding axisymmetric marginally outer trapped surfaces

AU - Booth, Ivan

AU - Hennigar, Robie A.

AU - Pook-Kolb, Daniel

N1 - Funding Information: We would like to express our gratitude to Graham Cox, Jose Luis Jaramillo, Badri Krishnan, Hari Kunduri and the members of the Memorial University Gravity Journal Club for valuable discussions and suggestions. I. B. was supported by the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grant No. 2018-0473. The work of R. A. H. was supported by the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada through the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship program and also by AOARD Grant No. FA2386-19-1-4077.

PY - 2021/10/25

Y1 - 2021/10/25

N2 - In classical numerical relativity, marginally outer trapped surfaces (MOTSs) are the main tool to locate and characterize black holes. For five decades it has been known that during a binary merger, a new outer horizon forms around the initial apparent horizons of the individual holes once they are sufficiently close together. However the ultimate fate of those initial horizons has remained a subject of speculation. Recent axisymmetric studies have shed new light on this process and this pair of papers essentially completes that line of research: we resolve the key features of the post-swallowing axisymmetric evolution of the initial horizons. This first paper introduces a new shooting-method for finding axisymmetric MOTSs along with a reinterpretation of the stability operator as the analogue of the Jacobi equation for families of MOTSs. Here, these tools are used to study exact solutions and initial data. In the sequel paper [Phys. Rev. D 104, 084084 (2021)] they are applied to black hole mergers.

AB - In classical numerical relativity, marginally outer trapped surfaces (MOTSs) are the main tool to locate and characterize black holes. For five decades it has been known that during a binary merger, a new outer horizon forms around the initial apparent horizons of the individual holes once they are sufficiently close together. However the ultimate fate of those initial horizons has remained a subject of speculation. Recent axisymmetric studies have shed new light on this process and this pair of papers essentially completes that line of research: we resolve the key features of the post-swallowing axisymmetric evolution of the initial horizons. This first paper introduces a new shooting-method for finding axisymmetric MOTSs along with a reinterpretation of the stability operator as the analogue of the Jacobi equation for families of MOTSs. Here, these tools are used to study exact solutions and initial data. In the sequel paper [Phys. Rev. D 104, 084084 (2021)] they are applied to black hole mergers.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85118401417&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.48550/arXiv.2104.11343

DO - 10.48550/arXiv.2104.11343

M3 - Article

VL - 104

JO - Physical Review D

JF - Physical Review D

SN - 2470-0010

IS - 8

M1 - 084083

ER -