{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/precessional-dynamics-of-black-hole-triples","title":"Precessional dynamics of black hole triples: binary mergers with near-zero effective spin","arxiv_id":"1711.07142","date":"2017-11-20","proceeding":null,"authors":["Fabio Antonini","Carl L. Rodriguez","Cristobal Petrovich","Caitlin L. Fischer"],"abstract":"The binary black hole mergers detected by Advanced LIGO/Virgo have shown no evidence of large black hole spins. However, because LIGO/Virgo best measures the effective combination of the two spins along the orbital angular momentum ($\\chi_{\\rm eff}$), it is difficult to distinguish between binaries with slowly-spinning black holes and binaries with spins lying in the orbital plane. Here, we study the spin dynamics for binaries with a distant black hole companion. For spins initially aligned with the orbital angular momentum of the binary, we find that $\\chi_{\\rm eff}$ \"freezes\" near zero as the orbit decays through the emission of gravitational waves. Through a population study, we show that this process predominantly leads to merging black hole binaries with near-zero $\\chi_{\\rm eff}$. We conclude that if the detected black hole binaries were formed in triples, then this would explain their low $\\chi_{\\rm eff}$ without the need to invoke near-zero spins or initially large spin-orbit angles.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1711.07142v2","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.07142v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"precessional-dynamics-of-black-hole-triples","repo_url":"https://github.com/carlrodriguez/kozai","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"precessional-dynamics-of-black-hole-triples","repo_url":"https://github.com/antoninifabio/tripleBH","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}