Apparent horizon mergers in analytic intial data

Abstract

Five years ago Pook-Kolb, Hennigar and Booth published a series of three papers exploring the evolution of apparent horizons and other marginally outer trapped surfaces during a black hole merger. This was seen to be much more intricate than the well-known "pair-of-pants" merger associated with event horizons. In this paper we show that parameter evolutions of Brill-Lindquist-deSitter initial data mimic many of the features of that evolution. Hence, this analytic intial data is a useful testing ground for ideas about marginally outer trapped surface evolution and spacetime geometry during mergers.