Observability of spin precession in the presence of a black-hole remnant kick

Abstract

Remnants of binary black-hole mergers can gain significant recoil or kick velocities when the binaries are asymmetric. The kick is the consequence of the anisotropic emission of gravitational waves, which may leave a characteristic imprint in the observed signal. So far, only one gravitational-wave event supports a nonzero kick velocity: GW200129_065458. This signal is also the first to show evidence for spin precession. For most other gravitational-wave observations, spin orientations are poorly constrained as this would require large signal-to-noise ratios, unequal mass ratios, or inclined systems. Here we investigate whether the imprint of the kick can help to extract more information about the spins. We perform an injection and recovery study comparing binary black-hole signals with significantly different kick magnitudes, but the same spin magnitudes and spin tilts. To exclude the impact of higher signal harmonics in parameter estimation, we focus on equal-mass binaries that are oriented face-on. This is also motivated by the fact that equal-mass binaries produce the largest kicks and many observed gravitational-wave events are expected to be close to this configuration. We generate signals with henom4a, which includes mode asymmetries. These asymmetries are the main cause for the kick in precessing binaries. For comparison with an equivalent model without asymmetries, we repeat the same injections with henom. We find that signals with large kicks necessarily include large asymmetries, and these give more structure to the signal, leading to more informative measurements of the spins and mass ratio. Our results also complement previous findings that argued precession in equal-mass, face-on, or face-away binaries is nearly impossible to identify. In contrast, we find that in the presence of a remnant kick, even those signals become more informative and allow determining precession with signal-to-noise ratios observable already by current gravitational-wave detectors. Published by the American Physical Society 2024