Tearing up the disc: misaligned accretion on to a binary

In a recent paper, we have shown that the evolution of a misaligned disc around a spinning black hole can result in tearing the disc into many distinct planes. Tearing discs with random orientations produce direct dynamical accretion on to the hole in 70 per cent of all cases. Here, we examine the evolution of a misaligned disc around a binary system. We show that these discs are susceptible to tearing for almost all inclinations. We also show that tearing of the disc can result in a significant acceleration of the disc evolution and subsequent accretion on to the binary - by factors up to 104 times that of a coplanar prograde disc with otherwise identical parameters. This provides a promising mechanism for driving mergers of supermassive black hole (SMBH) binaries on time-scales much shorter than a Hubble time. Disc tearing also suggests new observational signatures of accreting SMBH binaries and other systems such as protostellar binaries.