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Marta Cocco

Publications and source records attributed to Marta Cocco.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Tidal perturbations of an extreme mass ratio inspiral around a Kerr black hole

We determine the metric of a Kerr black hole subject to external tidal fields using metric reconstruction techniques. Working within the Newman-Penrose formalism, we solve the Teukolsky master equation for static, quadrupolar modes associated with a slowly varying tidal environment, and reconstruct the corresponding metric perturbation in the outgoing radiation gauge. As an application, we derive the secular Hamiltonian governing the motion of a test particle in the tidally deformed Kerr spacetime and investigate long-term tidal effects relevant to extreme-mass-ratio inspirals. In particular, we compute tidal-induced shifts of the innermost stable circular orbit and the light ring. We find that these tidal corrections are strongly spin dependent, with significantly larger effects for retrograde orbits around rapidly rotating black holes. Our results provide a fully analytic framework for studying tidal interactions and secular dynamics in rotating black-hole spacetimes, with direct applications to gravitational-wave modeling and tests of gravity in the strong-field regime.

gr-qc

Observable signature of magnetic tidal coupling in hierarchical triple systems

We study hierarchical triple systems formed by a compact binary orbiting a supermassive black hole (SMBH), focusing on the role of relativistic magnetic tidal interactions. Extending previous analyses of precession resonances to 0.5 post-Newtonian order, we incorporate quadrupolar magnetic tidal moments, which have no Newtonian counterpart. We find that magnetic tides introduce new resonances absent at lower order, leading to additional eccentricity excitations and significantly modifying the binary's long-term evolution. Numerical solutions of the Lagrange Planetary Equations confirm these analytical predictions and reveal how resonance strength depends on orbital eccentricity and inclination. The resulting dynamics accelerates the binary merger and imprints distinctive signatures on gravitational waves, potentially observable by LISA. Our findings identify magnetic tidal coupling as a novel strong-gravity effect and establish its importance for the resonant dynamics of compact-object binaries near SMBHs.

gr-qc

Strong-gravity precession resonances for binary systems orbiting a Schwarzschild black hole

Binary systems of compact objects in close orbit around a supermassive black hole (SMBH) may form in galactic nuclei, providing a unique environment to probe strong-gravity tidal effects on the binary's dynamics. In this work, we investigate precession resonances arising between the periastron precession frequency of a binary system and its orbital frequencies around the SMBH. By modeling the SMBH as a Schwarzschild black hole, we find that relativistic effects in the tidal field give rise to a significantly richer resonance spectrum compared to the Newtonian case. This result is supported by both perturbative and numerical analyses of the quadrupolar tidal interaction in the strong-gravity regime. Our results reveal new signatures for strong-gravity effects in such triple systems, with potential implications for gravitational-wave astronomy.

gr-qc