Paper detail

Black hole mergers, gravitational waves and scaling relations

Observations of gravitational waves provide new opportunities to study our Universe. In particular, mergers of stellar black holes are the main targets of the current gravitational wave experiments. In order to make accurate predictions, it is however necessary to simulate the mergers in numerical general relativity, which requires high performance computing. While scaling relations are used to rescale simulations for very massive black holes, primordial black holes have specific properties which can invalidate the rescaling. Similarly black holes in theories beyond Einstein's relativity can have different scaling properties. In this article, we consider scaling relations for the most general cases of primordial black holes, such as charged and spinned black holes, and study the effects of the cosmological expansion and of Hawking evaporation. We also consider more exotic black hole models and derive the corresponding scaling relations, which can be compared to the observations in order to identify the underlying black hole model and can be used to rescale the numerical simulations of exotic black hole mergers.