Modeling gravitational recoil from precessing highly-spinning unequal-mass black-hole binaries

Abstract

We measure the gravitational recoil for unequal-mass-black- hole-binary mergers, with the larger BH having spin a/m^H=0.8, and the smaller BH non-spinning. We choose our configurations such that, initially, the spins lie on the orbital plane. The spin and orbital plane precess significantly, and we find that the out-of plane recoil (i.e. the recoil perpendicular to the orbital plane around merger) varies as \eta^2 / (1+q), in agreement with our previous prediction, based on the post-Newtonian scaling.