Eur. Phys. J. C (2014) 74: 3012
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-014-3012-2

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

Chaos in two black holes with next-to-leading order spin–spin interactions

Department of Physics, Nanchang University, Nanchang, 330031, China

^* e-mail: xwu@ncu.edu.cn

Received: 3 March 2014
Accepted: 29 July 2014
Published online: 13 August 2014

Abstract

We take into account the dynamics of a complete third post-Newtonian conservative Hamiltonian of two spinning black holes, where the orbital part arrives at the third post-Newtonian precision level and the spin–spin part with the spin–orbit part includes the leading-order and next-to-leading-order contributions. It is shown through numerical simulations that the next-to-leading-order spin–spin couplings play an important role in chaos. A dynamical sensitivity to the variation of single parameter is also investigated in some cases. In particular, there are a number of observable orbits whose initial radii are large enough and which are chaotic before coalescence.