320 Whitmore Laboratory and Zoom: https://psu.zoom.us/j/93737760341?pwd=Qlc4bWFDU0taSHhJK0RHeWMvendHZz09
11:00 AM
12:00 PM
One of the important parameters that can provide clues about the formation of binary black hole mergers detected by ground-based gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO/Virgo is the spin orientations of the black hole. Specifically, the spin tilts, i.e., the angles between the spin vector of each black hole and the binary orbital angular momentum vector, can change due to precessional effects as the black holes evolve from a large separation to their merger. Depending on the value of these tilts, binary black holes can exhibit different morphologies which can be related to the binary's formation channel. Hence measuring spin parameters accurately is consequential in constraining binary formation history. In this talk, I'll discuss some of my group's recent work that deals with spin precession dynamics in binary black holes. All these works have the same goal: exploiting spin precession dynamics of binary black holes to understand their formation pathways.