arXiv subjects

Badri Krishnan

Publications and source records attributed to Badri Krishnan.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Universality in the Transition from Inspiral to Plunge: High-Accuracy Analytic Solutions and Catastrophe Theory

We revisit the transition from inspiral to plunge for extreme mass-ratio inspirals on quasi-circular, inclined orbits in Kerr spacetime from the perspective of catastrophe theory. Our goal is to uncover the mathematical structures underlying the universality of the transition dynamics, which remains governed by the same Painlev\'e I differential equation as for equatorial inspirals despite the additional complexity. We first analyze the solution of the Painlev\'e I equation selected by the physical boundary conditions of slowly evolving quasi-circular inspiral at early times. We argue that these conditions uniquely select the tritronqu\'ee solution of Painlev\'e I. We then compare existing high-accuracy analytic approximations of the tritronqu\'ee solution with direct numerical integrations of the Painlev\'e I equation, finding comparable accuracy and improved stability under differentiation and integration for the analytic solution. In the second part of this work, we show that the equilibrium structure of the Kerr radial effective potential admits a natural interpretation in terms of catastrophe theory. Equatorial orbits are associated with the fold catastrophe, while inclined orbits are described by the cusp catastrophe. In both cases, the transition to plunge corresponds to slow evolution across fold lines of the catastrophe manifold, providing a geometric explanation for the universal appearance of the Painlev\'e I equation in the transition dynamics.

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arXiv2026

Numerical self-force calculations for scalar particles, formulated in the lab frame

We derive equations of motion for scalar particles self-consistently interacting with a scalar field,including the radiation produced by the particles' acceleration. Our approach differs in three key aspects from current methods: (1) we assume a small but finite discretization length scale $h$, which allows us to treat the particle as a small but finite object, (2) we choose the state vector for the system before deriving equations of motion, and (3) we formulate the equations explicitly in the lab frame and not in a manifestly covariant manner. This approach, which is self-consistent, happens to greatly simplify the resulting equations and their derivation, and is directly suitable for numerical calculations. The result is an effective source method which generalizes to electrodynamics or general relativity in a straightforward manner (although we do not consider this here). We then provide two possible discretizations of these equations, based on finite volumes and spectral methods, and show results of one-dimensional calculations. These calculations show excellent agreement with analytic solutions.

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arXiv2026

Cusp Formation in Merging Black Hole Horizons

An important question in binary black hole mergers is to connect properties of the remnant black hole to those of the two initial black holes. These properties include not only the final mass and spin of the remnant, but also higher multipoles and answers to other questions such as, for a given initial configuration, which quasi-normal modes of the final black hole are excited, and what are the amplitudes of these modes? Such questions have thus far been primarily addressed through a study of the emitted gravitational wave signal. In this paper we consider a different alternative, namely using quasi-local black hole horizons themselves to establish the link between the initial and final states. Recent work has elucidated the behavior of black hole horizons in a merger. Cusps forming in such otherwise smoothly evolving horizons have been shown to play a central role in connecting the two initially separate black holes with the final remnant. In the present work, we will discuss from a numerical perspective how such cusps form in detail for the head-on collision of two non-spinning black holes. We show how the mass and higher mass multipole moments behave at the cusp and suggest a phenomenological model.

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arXiv2025

Asymptotics and Universality in Black Holes: from the quasinormal Weyl's law to the binary merger waveform

Current state-of-the-art approaches to black hole (BH) dynamics, encompassing several effective approximation schemes, offer a remarkable control of the quantitative aspects of strong gravity. They also provide key insights into some qualitative aspects of the problem. In spite of this, there remain blind spots that hinder the understanding of the mechanisms underlying some observed phenomena, in particular concerning simplicity and universality in BH spacetimes. Adopting an 'asymptotic reasoning' approach, by filtering non-essential degrees of freedom, can potentially unveil universality patterns by identifying key underlying structural stability mechanisms. We first illustrate such an asymptotic approach by focusing on a BH quasinormal (QNM) Weyl's law, that accounts for the universal asymptotics of the QNM "counting function". This permits to identify light-trapping and the (local) redshift effect as the underlying mechanisms, also offering a bridge to the universal patterns found in BH QNM spectral instability. As a by-product, Weyl's law universality formally opens an observational access to spacetime (effective) dimensionality. More heuristically, we sketch a program recently put forward to apply such 'asymptotic reasoning' to address the observed simplicity and universality patterns in binary BH merger dynamics. This program is built as a hierarchy of asymptotic models, potentially making contact with integrability theory in gravity, namely through the background sector in a "wave-mean flow" approach to BH binary dynamics.

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arXiv2025

Dynamical Horizon Segments and Spacetime Isometries

Given a space-time $(\mathscr{M}, g_{ab})$ admitting a dynamical horizon segment (DHS) $\mathscr{H}$, we show that there are stringent constraints on the Killing fields $\xi^a$ that $g_{ab}$ can admit in a neighborhood of $\mathscr{H}$: Generically, $\xi^a$ can only be a rotational Killing field which, furthermore, leaves each marginally trapped 2-sphere cross-section $\mathcal{S}$ of $\mathscr{H}$ invariant. Finally, if $\xi^a$ happens to be hypersurface orthogonal near $\mathscr{H}$, then, not only the angular momentum but also all spin multipoles vanish on every $\mathcal{S}$; the entire spin structure of these DHSs is indistinguishable from that of spherically symmetric DHSs!

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arXiv2025

Black hole spectroscopy: from theory to experiment

The "ringdown" radiation emitted by oscillating black holes has great scientific potential. By carefully predicting the frequencies and amplitudes of black hole quasinormal modes and comparing them with gravitational-wave data from compact binary mergers we can advance our understanding of the two-body problem in general relativity, verify the predictions of the theory in the regime of strong and dynamical gravitational fields, and search for physics beyond the Standard Model or new gravitational degrees of freedom. We summarize the state of the art in our understanding of black hole quasinormal modes in general relativity and modified gravity, their excitation, and the modeling of ringdown waveforms. We also review the status of LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA ringdown observations, data analysis techniques, and the bright prospects of the field in the era of LISA and next-generation ground-based gravitational-wave detectors.

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arXiv2025

Quasi-Local Black Hole Horizons: Recent Advances

While the early literature on black holes focused on event horizons, subsequently it was realized that their teleological nature makes them unsuitable for many physical applications both in classical and quantum gravity. Therefore, over the past two decades, event horizons have been steadily replaced by quasi-local horizons which do not suffer from teleology. In numerical simulations event horizons can be located as an `after thought' only after the entire space-time has been constructed. By contrast, quasi-local horizons naturally emerge in the course of these simulations, providing powerful gauge-invariant tools to extract physics from the numerical outputs. They also lead to interesting results in mathematical GR, providing unforeseen insights. For example, for event horizons we only have a qualitative result that their area cannot decrease, while for quasi-local horizons the increase in the area during a dynamical phase is quantitatively related to local physical processes at the horizon. In binary black hole mergers, there are interesting correlations between observables associated with quasi-local horizons and those defined at future null infinity. Finally, the quantum Hawking process is naturally described as formation and evaporation of a quasi-local horizon. This review focuses on the dynamical aspects of quasi-local horizons in classical general relativity, emphasizing recent results and ongoing research.

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arXiv2024

Can Neutron Star Tidal Effects Obscure Deviations from General Relativity?

One of the main goals of gravitational-wave astrophysics is to study gravity in the strong-field regime and constrain deviations from general relativity (GR). Any such deviation affects not only binary dynamics and gravitational-wave emission but also the structure and tidal properties of compact objects. In the case of neutron stars, masses, radii, and tidal deformabilities can all differ significantly between different theories of gravity. Currently, the measurement uncertainties in neutron star radii and tidal deformabilities are quite large. However, much less is known about how the large uncertainty in the nuclear equation of state (EOS) might affect tests of GR using binary neutron star mergers. Conversely, using the wrong theory of gravity might lead to incorrect constraints on the nuclear EOS. Here, we study this problem within scalar-tensor (ST) theory. We apply the recently derived $\ell = 2$ tidal Love numbers in this theory to parameter estimation of GW170817. Correspondingly, we test if physics beyond GR could bias measurements of the nuclear EOS and neutron star radii. We find that parameter inference for both the GR and ST cases return consistent component masses and tidal deformabilities. The radius and the EOS posteriors, however, differ between the two theories, but neither is excluded by current observational limits. This indicates that measurements of the nuclear EOS may be biased and that deviations from GR could go undetected when analyzing current binary neutron star mergers.

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arXiv2023

A gating-and-inpainting perspective on GW150914 ringdown overtone: understanding the data analysis systematics

We revisit the recent debate on the evidence for an overtone in the black hole ringdown of GW150914 using an independent data-analysis pipeline. By gating and inpainting the data, we discard the contamination from earlier parts of the gravitational wave signal before ringdown. This enables parameter estimation to be conducted in the frequency domain, which is mathematically equivalent to the time domain method. We keep the settings as similar as possible to the previous studies by Cotesta et al. arXiv:2201.00822 and Isi et al. arXiv:1905.00869 arXiv:2202.02941 which yielded conflicting results on the Bayes factor of the overtone. Our aim is to understand how different data analysis systematics, including sampling rates, erroneous timestamps, and the frequency resolution of the noise power spectrum, would influence the statistical significance of an overtone. Our main results indicate the following: (i) a low-resolution estimation of the noise power spectrum tends to diminish the significance of overtones, (ii) adjusting the start time to a later digitized point reduces the significance of overtones, and (iii) overtone evidence varies with different sampling rates if the start time is too early, indicating that the overtone is a poor model, hence we propose a convergence test to verify the validity of an overtone model. With these issues addressed, we find the Bayes factors for the overtone to range from $10$ to $26$ in a range of times centered at the best-fit merger time of GW150914, which supports the existence of an overtone in agreement with the conclusions of Isi et al. arXiv:1905.00869 arXiv:2202.02941. These results are obtained by keeping the start time and sky location fixed, enabling a direct comparison with other work. Marginalizing over these parameters would lower the Bayes factor to 1 for the evidence of an overtone.

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arXiv2023

Spectroscopy for asymmetric binary black hole mergers

We study Bayesian inference of black hole ringdown modes for simulated binary black hole signals. We consider to what extent different fundamental ringdown modes can be identified in the context of black hole spectroscopy. Our simulated signals are inspired by the high mass event GW190521. We find strong correlation between mass ratio and Bayes factors of the subdominant ringdown modes. The Bayes factor values and time dependency, and the peak time of the (3,3,0) mode align with those found analyzing the real event GW190521, particularly for high-mass ratio systems.

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arXiv2023

Properties of Quasi-local mass in binary black hole mergers

Identifying a general quasi-local notion of energy-momentum and angular momentum would be an important advance in general relativity with potentially important consequences for mathematical and astrophysical studies in general relativity. In this paper we study a promising approach to this problem first proposed by Wang and Yau in 2009 based on isometric embeddings of closed surfaces in Minkowski space. We study the properties of the Wang-Yau quasi-local mass in high accuracy numerical simulations of the head-on collisions of two non-spinning black holes within full general relativity. We discuss the behavior of the Wang-Yau quasi-local mass on constant expansion surfaces and we compare its behavior with the irreducible mass. We investigate the time evolution of the Wang-Yau Quasi-local mass in numerical examples. In addition we discuss mathematical subtleties in defining the Wang-Yau mass for marginally trapped surfaces.

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arXiv2023

Nonlinear ringdown at the black hole horizon

The gravitational waves emitted by a perturbed black hole ringing down are well described by damped sinusoids, whose frequencies are those of quasinormal modes. Typically, first-order black hole perturbation theory is used to calculate these frequencies. Recently, it was shown that second-order effects are necessary in binary black hole merger simulations to model the gravitational-wave signal observed by a distant observer. Here, we show that the horizon of a newly formed black hole after the head-on collision of two black holes also shows evidence of non-linear modes. Specifically, we identify one quadratic mode for the $l=2$ shear data, and two quadratic ones for the $l=4,6$ data in simulations with varying mass ratio and boost parameter. The quadratic mode amplitudes display a quadratic relationship with the amplitudes of the linear modes that generate them.

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arXiv2023

Universality in Binary Black Hole Dynamics: An Integrability Conjecture

The waveform of a binary black hole coalescence appears to be both simple and universal. In this essay we argue that the dynamics should admit a separation into 'fast and slow' degrees of freedom, such that the latter are described by an integrable system of equations, accounting for the simplicity and universality of the waveform. Given that Painlev\'e transcendents are a smoking gun of integrable structures, we propose the Painlev\'e-II transcendent as the key structural element threading a hierarchy of asymptotic models aiming at capturing different (effective) layers in the dynamics. Ward's conjecture relating integrable and (anti)self-dual solutions can provide the avenue to encode background binary black hole data in (non-local) twistor structures.

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arXiv2022

Painlev\'e-II approach to binary black hole merger dynamics: universality from integrability

The binary black hole merger waveform is both simple and universal. Adopting an effective asymptotic description of the dynamics, we aim at accounting for such universality in terms of underlying (effective) integrable structures. More specifically, under a ``wave-mean flow'' perspective, we propose that fast degrees of freedom corresponding to the observed waveform would be subject to effective linear dynamics, propagating on a slowly evolving background subject to (effective) non-linear integrable dynamics. The Painlev\'e property of the latter would be implemented in terms of the so-called Painlev\'e-II transcendent, providing a structural link between i) orbital (in particular, EMRI) dynamics in the inspiral phase, ii) self-similar solutions of non-linear dispersive Korteweg-de Vries-like equations (namely, the `modified Korteweg-de Vries' equation) through the merger and iii) the matching with the isospectral features of black hole quasi-normal modes in late ringdown dynamics. Moreover, the Painlev\'e-II equation provides also a `non-linear turning point' problem, extending the linear discussion in the recently introduced Airy approach to binary black hole merger waveforms. Under the proposed integrability perspective, the simplicity and universality of the binary black hole merger waveform would be accounted to by the `hidden symmetries' of the underlying integrable (effective) dynamics. In the spirit of asymptotic reasoning, and considering Ward's conjecture linking integrability and self-dual Yang-Mills structures, it is tantalizing to question if such universal patterns would reflect the actual full integrability of a (self-dual) sector of general relativity, ultimately responsible for the binary black hole waveform patterns.

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arXiv2022

Estimating False Alarm Rates of Sub-Dominant Quasi-normal Modes in GW190521

A major aim of gravitational wave astronomy is to test observationally the Kerr nature of black holes. The strongest such test, with minimal additional assumptions, is provided by observations of multiple ringdown modes, also known as black hole spectroscopy. For the gravitational wave merger event GW190521, we have previously claimed the detection of two ringdown modes emitted by the remnant black hole. In this paper we provide further evidence for the detection of multiple ringdown modes from this event. We analyse the recovery of simulated gravitational wave signals designed to replicate the ringdown properties of GW190521. We quantify how often our detection statistic reports strong evidence for a sub-dominant $(\ell,m,n)=(3,3,0)$ ringdown mode, even when no such mode is present in the simulated signal. We find this only occurs with a probability $\sim 0.02$, which is consistent with a Bayes factor of $t_{\rm ref} + 6\,\mathrm{ms}$ (1$\sigma$ uncertainty) found for GW190521. We also quantify our agnostic analysis of GW190521, in which no relationship is assumed between ringdown modes, and find that only 1 in 250 simulated signals without a $(3,3,0)$ mode yields a result as significant as GW190521. Conversely, we verify that when simulated signals do have an observable $(3,3,0)$ mode they consistently yield a strong evidence and significant agnostic results. We also find that constraints on deviations from the $(3,3,0)$ mode on GW190521-like signals with a $(3,3,0)$ mode are consistent with what was obtained from our previous analysis of GW190521. Our results support our previous conclusion that the gravitational wave signal from GW190521 contains an observable sub-dominant $(\ell,m,n)=(3,3,0)$ mode.

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arXiv2022

Airy-function approach to binary black hole merger waveforms: The fold-caustic diffraction model

From numerical simulations of the Einstein equations, and also from gravitational wave observations, the gravitational wave signal from a binary black hole merger is seen to be simple and to possess certain universal features. The simplicity is somewhat surprising given that non-linearities of general relativity are thought to play an important role at the merger. The universal features include an increasing amplitude as we approach the merger, where transition from an oscillatory to a damped regime occurs in a pattern apparently oblivious to the initial conditions. We propose an Airy-function pattern to model the binary black hole (BBH) merger waveform, focusing on accounting for its simplicity and universality. We postulate that the relevant universal features are controlled by a physical mechanism involving: i) a caustic phenomenon in a basic `geometric optics' approximation and, ii) a diffraction over the caustic regularizing its divergence. Universality of caustics and their diffraction patterns account for the observed universal features, as in optical phenomena such as rainbows. This postulate, if true, allows us to borrow mathematical techniques from Singularity (Catastrophe) Theory, in particular Arnol'd-Thom's theorem, and to understand binary mergers in terms of fold caustics. The diffraction pattern corresponding to the fold-caustic is given in terms of the Airy function, which leads (under a `uniform approximation') to the waveform model written in terms of a parameterized Airy function. The post-merger phase does not share the same features of simplicity and universality, and must be added separately. Nevertheless, our proposal allows a smooth matching of the inspiral and post-merger signals by using the known asymptotics of the Airy function.

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arXiv2021

Model systematics in time domain tests of binary black hole evolution

We perform several consistency tests between different phases of binary black hole dynamics; the inspiral, the merger, and the ringdown on the gravitational wave events GW150914 and GW170814. These tests are performed explicitly in the time domain, without any spectral leakage between the different phases. We compute posterior distributions on the mass and spin of the initial black holes and the final black hole. We also compute the initial areas of the two individual black holes and the final area from the parameters describing the remnant black hole. This facilitates a test of Hawking's black hole area theorem. We use different waveform models to quantify systematic waveform uncertainties for the area increase law with the two events. We find that these errors may lead to overstating the confidence with which the area theorem is confirmed. For example, we find $>99\%$ agreement with the area theorem for GW150914 if a damped sinusoid consisting of a single-mode is used at merger to estimate the final area. This is because this model overestimates the final mass. Including an overtone of the dominant mode decreases the confidence to $\sim94\%$; using a full merger-ringdown model further decreases the confidence to $\sim 85-90\%$. We find that comparing the measured change in the area to the expected change in area yields a more robust test, as it also captures over estimates in the change of area. We find good agreement with GR when applying this test to GW150914 and GW170814.

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arXiv2021

Testing gravitational waveform models using angular momentum

The anticipated enhancements in detector sensitivity and the corresponding increase in the number of gravitational wave detections will make it possible to estimate parameters of compact binaries with greater accuracy assuming general relativity(GR), and also to carry out sharper tests of GR itself. Crucial to these procedures are accurate gravitational waveform models. The systematic errors of the models must stay below statistical errors to prevent biases in parameter estimation and to carry out meaningful tests of GR. Comparisons of the models against numerical relativity (NR) waveforms provide an excellent measure of systematic errors. A complementary approach is to use balance laws provided by Einstein's equations to measure faithfulness of a candidate waveform against exact GR. Each balance law focuses on a physical observable and measures the accuracy of the candidate waveform vis a vis that observable. Therefore, this analysis can provide new physical insights into sources of errors. In this paper we focus on the angular momentum balance law, using post-Newtonian theory to calculate the initial angular momentum, surrogate fits to obtain the remnant spin and waveforms from models to calculate the flux. The consistency check provided by the angular momentum balance law brings out the marked improvement in the passage from \texttt{IMRPhenomPv2} to \texttt{IMRPhenomXPHM} and from \texttt{SEOBNRv3} to \texttt{SEOBNRv4PHM} and shows that the most recent versions agree quite well with exact GR. For precessing systems, on the other hand, we find that there is room for further improvement, especially for the Phenom models.

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