Gravitational Wave Beacons
  We explore spinning, precessing, unequal mass binary black holes to display
the long term orbital angular momentum, $\vec{L}$, flip dynamics. We study two
prototypical cases of binaries with mass ratios $q=1/7$ and $q=1/15$ and a
misaligned spin of the large black hole (with an intrinsic spin magnitude of
$S_2/m_2^2=0.85$). We conduct full numerical simulations, for nearly 14 and 18
orbits respectively, to evolve the binary down to merger and display a full
$L$-flip cycle. The pattern of radiation of such systems is particularly
interesting, displaying strong polarization-dependent variation of amplitudes
at precessional frequencies, leading to distinctive observational consequences
for ground, space, and pulsar timing based gravitational wave detectors. These
waveform features are strongly directional dependent and measurements of
gravitational waves polarizations can be exploited to disentangle the binary's
parameters in various astrophysical scenarios.
