Radiation Recoil from Spinning Black Hole Mergers

This thesis covers two distinct projects on gravitational wave physics. The rst project is a mathematical computation of the gravitational radiation recoil from spinning black hole binary mergers. Radiation recoil speeds have important impli- cations in several astrophysical scenarios such as black hole ejection from globular clusters and dwarf galaxies, hierarchical formation of black holes and more. The inability to directly measure this eect means that theoretical predictions oer the only insight into the size and importance of radiation recoil in the aforementioned astrophysical scenarios. The result found is that spin has the eect of reducing the recoil. Furthermore, the recoil speed is bounded above by roughly 100 km/s. The second project details computing the Fisher information matrix and pa- rameter space search metric for spinning down periodic sources using a simple Ptolemaic" model of the Earth's orbit. This is then used to determine the opti- mal grid for the LIGO periodic sources group to search for unknown pulsar signals.