Modeling Charge in Black Hole Binary Mergers Using the Backwards One Body Model

Electric charge is generally neglected when considering astrophysical black holes (BHs), although it is permitted by the no hair theorem, with charged and spinning black holes being described by the Kerr-Newman solution. Einstein-Maxwell theory, the simplest and most widely used model for combining gravity with electromagnetism, works simply by inserting the electromagnetic stress-energy tensor into Einstein’s equations. The Backwards One Body (BOB) model has been shown to precisely model the strain for the late inspiral, merger, and ringdown for BH mergers forming Kerr BHs. We will present our extension of the BOB model to Kerr-Newman BH merger remnants. In order to demonstrate the validity of BOB within the Kerr-Newman regime, numerical relativity simulations of merging charged black holes were performed with a modified version of the Einstein Toolkit created by Gabriele Bozzola and Vasileios Paschalidis. We note that this work can be generalized to magnetic charges, dark-sector charges, and gravitational charges in theories of gravity mediated by a vector field so there are many opportunities for this work to be used in tests of fundamental physics.