Analysis of late-time tails in spin-aligned eccentric binary black hole mergers
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 , dimensionless spins , and eccentricity at the last stable orbit . We track the tail amplitudes and exponents up to a retarded time coordinate 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 and large negative spin . We find that the overall late-time exponents closely approach their predicted asymptotic values ( for Weyl curvature scalar where 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 share identical tail exponents, while variations in 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.