{
  "id": "1807.09281",
  "version": "v1",
  "published": "2018-07-24T18:00:09.000Z",
  "updated": "2018-07-24T18:00:09.000Z",
  "title": "Intermediate-Mass Ratio Inspirals in Galactic Nuclei",
  "authors": [
    "Giacomo Fragione",
    "Nathan Leigh"
  ],
  "comment": "8 pages, 5 figures, 1 Table",
  "categories": [
    "astro-ph.GA",
    "astro-ph.HE"
  ],
  "abstract": "In this paper, we study the secular dynamical evolution of binaries composed of intermediate-mass and stellar-mass black holes (IMBHs and SBHs, respectively) in orbit about a central super-massive black hole (SMBH) in galactic nuclei. Such BH triplets could form via the inspiral of globular clusters toward galactic nuclei due to dynamical friction, or even major/minor galaxy mergers. We perform, for reasonable initial conditions that we justify, sophisticated $N$-body simulations that include both regularization and Post-Newtonian corrections. We find that mass segregation combined with Kozai-Lidov oscillations induced by the primary SMBH can effectively merge IMBH-SBH binaries on time-scales much shorter than gravitational wave emission alone. Moreover, the rate of such extreme mass ratio inspirals could be high ($\\sim 1\\ \\mathrm{Gpc}^{-3}\\ \\mathrm{yr}^{-1}$) in the local Universe, but these are expected to be associated with recent GC infall or major/minor mergers, making the observational signatures of such events (e.g., tidal debris) good diagnostics for searching for SMBH-IMBH-SBH mergers. A small fraction could also be associated with tidal disruption events by the IMBH-SBH during inspiral.",
  "revisions": [
    {
      "version": "v1",
      "updated": "2018-07-24T18:00:09.000Z"
    }
  ],
  "analyses": {
    "keywords": [
      "galactic nuclei",
      "intermediate-mass ratio inspirals",
      "extreme mass ratio inspirals",
      "central super-massive black hole",
      "tidal disruption events"
    ],
    "note": {
      "typesetting": "TeX",
      "pages": 8,
      "language": "en",
      "license": "arXiv",
      "status": "editable"
    }
  }
}