Does Charge Matter in High-Energy Collisions of Black Holes?

We perform numerical-relativity simulations of high-energy head-on collisions of charged black holes with the same charge-to-mass ratio λ. We find that electromagnetic interactions have subdominant effects already at low Lorentz factors γ, supporting the conjecture that the details of the properties of black holes (e.g.

General Relativistic Simulations of the Quasicircular Inspiral and Merger of Charged Black Holes: GW150914 and Fundamental Physics Implications.

We perform general-relativistic simulations of charged black holes targeting GW150914. We show that the inspiral is most efficient for detecting black hole charge through gravitational waves and that GW150914 is compatible with having charge-to-mass ratio as high as 0.3.