Black-hole kicks from numerical-relativity surrogate models
  Binary black holes radiate linear momentum in gravitational waves as they
merge. Recoils imparted to the black-hole remnant can reach thousands of km/s,
thus ejecting black holes from their host galaxies. We exploit recent advances
in gravitational waveform modeling to quickly and reliably extract recoils
imparted to generic, precessing, black hole binaries. Our procedure uses a
numerical-relativity surrogate model to obtain the gravitational waveform given
a set of binary parameters, then from this waveform we directly integrate the
gravitational-wave linear momentum flux. This entirely bypasses the need of
fitting formulae which are typically used to model black-hole recoils in
astrophysical contexts. We provide a thorough exploration of the black-hole
kick phenomenology in the parameter space, summarizing and extending previous
numerical results on the topic. Our extraction procedure is made publicly
available as a module for the Python programming language named SURRKICK. Kick
evaluations take ~0.1s on a standard off-the-shelf machine, thus making our
code ideal to be ported to large-scale astrophysical studies.
