Advances in Black-Hole Mergers: Spins and Unequal Masses

The last two years have seen incredible development in numerical relativity: from fractions of an orbit, evolutions of an equal-mass binary have reached multiple orbits, and convergent gravitational waveforms have been produced from several reserach groups and numerical codes. We are now able to move our attention from pure numerics to astrophysics, and address scenarios relevant to current and future gravitational-wave detectors. Over the last 12 months at NASA Goddard, we have extended the accuracy of our HahnDol code, and used it to move toward these goals. We have achieved high-accuracy simulations of black-hole binaries of low initial eccentricity, with enough orbits of inspiral before merger to allow us to produce hybrid waveforms that reflect accurately the entire lifetime of the BH binary. We are extending this work, looking at the effects of unequal masses and spins.