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    Analysis of late-time tails in spin-aligned eccentric binary black hole mergers

    Tousif Islam1,*, Guglielmo Faggioli2, and Gaurav Khanna3,4

    • *Contact author: tousifislam@ucsb.edu

    Phys. Rev. D 113, 124025 – Published 10 June, 2026

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/5pfc-rnl4

    Abstract

    We present a comprehensive analysis of late-time tails in gravitational radiation from merging spin-aligned eccentric binary black holes, using high-accuracy point-particle black hole perturbation theory simulations. We simulate the late-time evolution of 15 binary black hole mergers with mass ratio q=1000, dimensionless spins χ=[−0.9,−0.6,0.0,0.6,0.9], and eccentricity at the last stable orbit eLSO=[0.8,0.9,0.95]. We track the tail amplitudes and exponents up to a retarded time coordinate t=9000M after merger for the six spin-weighted spherical harmonic modes (2, 1), (2, 2), (3, 2), (3, 3), (4, 3), and (4, 4) employing both frequentist and Bayesian approaches. We note that the tails are increasingly pronounced for binaries with high eccentricity eLSO and large negative spin χ. We find that the overall late-time exponents closely approach their predicted asymptotic values (p=−ℓ−4 for Weyl curvature scalar ψ4,ℓm where ℓ is the spin-weighted spherical harmonic index), while estimates restricted to the latest portion of the data exactly recover them. We further verify numerically that modes with the same spherical index ℓ share identical tail exponents, while variations in m do not affect the tail behavior. Additionally, for completeness, we provide a brief exploration of the intermediate behavior of the tails. Our analysis framework is publicly available through the gwtails python package.

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