Intermediate mass black holes' effect on compact object binaries
  Although their existence is not yet confirmed observationally, intermediate
mass black holes (IMBHs) may play a key role in the dynamics of galactic
nuclei. In this paper, we neglect the effect of the nuclear star cluster itself
and investigate only how a small reservoir of IMBHs influences the secular
dynamics of stellar-mass black hole binaries, using N-body simulations. We show
that our simplifications are valid and that the IMBHs significantly enhance
binary evaporation by pushing the binaries into the Hill-unstable region of
parameter space, where they are separated by the SMBH's tidal field. For
binaries in the S-cluster region of the Milky Way, IMBHs drive the binaries to
merge in up to 1-6% of cases, assuming five IMBHs within 5 pc of mass 10,000
solar masses each. Observations of binaries in the Galactic center may strongly
constrain the population of IMBHs therein.
