Criteria for identifying and evaluating locations that could potentially host the Cosmic Explorer observatories.

Cosmic Explorer is a next-generation ground-based gravitational-wave observatory that is being designed in the 2020s and is envisioned to begin operations in the 2030s together with the Einstein Telescope in Europe. The Cosmic Explorer concept currently consists of two widely separated L-shaped observatories in the United States, one with 40 km-long arms and the other with 20 km-long arms. This order of magnitude increase in scale with respect to the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observatories will, together with technological improvements, deliver an order of magnitude greater astronomical reach, allowing access to gravitational waves from remnants of the first stars and opening a wide discovery aperture to the novel and unknown.

Catalog of 174 binary black hole simulations for gravitational wave astronomy.

This Letter presents a publicly available catalog of 174 numerical binary black hole simulations following up to 35 orbits. The catalog includes 91 precessing binaries, mass ratios up to 8∶1, orbital eccentricities from a few percent to 10(-5), black hole spins up to 98% of the theoretical maximum, and radiated energies up to 11.1% of the initial mass.

Frame-dragging vortexes and tidal tendexes attached to colliding black holes: visualizing the curvature of spacetime.

When one splits spacetime into space plus time, the spacetime curvature (Weyl tensor) gets split into an "electric" part E(jk) that describes tidal gravity and a "magnetic" part B(jk) that describes differential dragging of inertial frames. We introduce tools for visualizing B(jk) (frame-drag vortex lines, their vorticity, and vortexes) and E(jk) (tidal tendex lines, their tendicity, and tendexes) and also visualizations of a black-hole horizon's (scalar) vorticity and tendicity. We use these tools to elucidate the nonlinear dynamics of curved spacetime in merging black-hole binaries.

Prospects for detection of gravitational waves from intermediate-mass-ratio inspirals.

We explore prospects for detecting gravitational waves from stellar-mass compact objects spiraling into intermediate mass black holes (BHs) M approximately 50M to 350M) with ground-based observatories. We estimate a rate for such intermediate-mass-ratio inspirals of View Article and Find Full Text PDF