Collisions of Multiple Black Holes: A Numerical Relativity Study

Abstract

Numerical relativity has a profound impact on gravitational theory and gravitational wave astronomy. In this work, we present a systematic study of the head-on collisions of multipule black hole systems within the framework of numerical relativity using the Baumgarte-Shapiro-Shibata-Nakamura (BSSN) formulation. The numerical simulations of the dynamical evolution of gravitational fields are computed using the AMSS-NCKU code. We report numerical results for black hole collisions in several symmetric and non-symmetric configurations, in which the black holes are initially at rest and are described by Bowen-York type initial data. Our results suggest that black hole systems with perfectly symmetric configurations (e.g., black holes located at the vertices of a regular polygon or a regular polyhedron) impose strong constraints on the emitted gravitational waves, and no gravitational kick arises in these symmetric systems. For regular polygonal configurations, the radiation is dominated by the plus polarization of the $l=2$, $m=0$ mode. For regular polyhedral configurations, all the quadrupole modes with $l=2$ nearly vanish, and gravitational wave amplitudes are strongly suppressed to the order of $10^{-4}$ or below, which is in accordance with an analysis based on the quadrupole approximation. Gravitational radiations from $m \ne 0$ modes become non-negligible only when non-symmetric configurations are encountered. Keywords: Numerical Relativity, Black Holes, Gravitational Waves, N-Body Systems