title: Gravity waves, chaos, and spinning compact binaries
abstract: Spinning compact binaries are shown to be chaotic in the post-Newtonian expansion of the two-body system. Chaos by definition is the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions and a consequent inability to predict the outcome of the evolution. As a result, the spinning pair will have unpredictable gravitational waveforms during coalescence. This poses a challenge to future gravity wave observatories which rely on a match between the data and a theoretical template.
authors.affiliation: DAMTP, Cambridge University, Wilberforce Road, Cambridge CB3 0WA, United Kingdom and and Astronomy Centre, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QJ, United Kingdom.
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Levin