• Open Access

Multipolar effective-one-body waveforms for precessing binary black holes: Construction and validation

Serguei Ossokine, Alessandra Buonanno, Sylvain Marsat, Roberto Cotesta, Stanislav Babak, Tim Dietrich, Roland Haas, Ian Hinder, Harald P. Pfeiffer, Michael Pürrer, Charles J. Woodford, Michael Boyle, Lawrence E. Kidder, Mark A. Scheel, and Béla Szilágyi
Phys. Rev. D 102, 044055 – Published 31 August 2020

Abstract

As gravitational-wave detectors become more sensitive and broaden their frequency bandwidth, we will access a greater variety of signals emitted by compact binary systems, shedding light on their astrophysical origin and environment. A key physical effect that can distinguish among different formation scenarios is the misalignment of the spins with the orbital angular momentum, causing the spins and the binary’s orbital plane to precess. To accurately model such precessing signals, especially when masses and spins vary in the wide astrophysical range, it is crucial to include multipoles beyond the dominant quadrupole. Here, we develop the first multipolar precessing waveform model in the effective-one-body (EOB) formalism for the entire coalescence stage (i.e., inspiral, merger and ringdown) of binary black holes: SEOBNRv4PHM. In the nonprecessing limit, the model reduces to SEOBNRv4HM, which was calibrated to numerical-relativity (NR) simulations, and waveforms from black-hole perturbation theory. We validate SEOBNRv4PHM by comparing it to the public catalog of 1405 precessing NR waveforms of the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) collaboration, and also to 118 SXS precessing NR waveforms, produced as part of this project, which span mass ratios 1-4 and (dimensionless) black-hole’s spins up to 0.9. We stress that SEOBNRv4PHM is not calibrated to NR simulations in the precessing sector. We compute the unfaithfulness against the 1523 SXS precessing NR waveforms, and find that, for 94% (57%) of the cases, the maximum value, in the total mass range 20200M, is below 3% (1%). Those numbers change to 83% (20%) when using the inspiral-merger-ringdown, multipolar, precessing phenomenological model IMRPhenomPv3HM. We investigate the impact of such unfaithfulness values with two Bayesian, parameter-estimation studies on synthetic signals. We also compute the unfaithfulness between those waveform models as a function of the mass and spin parameters to identify in which part of the parameter space they differ the most. We validate them also against the multipolar, precessing NR surrogate model NRSur7dq4, and find that the SEOBNRv4PHM model outperforms IMRPhenomPv3HM.

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  • Received 29 April 2020
  • Accepted 7 July 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.102.044055

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by the Max Planck Society.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

  1. Research Areas
Gravitation, Cosmology & Astrophysics

Authors & Affiliations

Serguei Ossokine1, Alessandra Buonanno1,2, Sylvain Marsat3,1, Roberto Cotesta1, Stanislav Babak3,1,4, Tim Dietrich5,1, Roland Haas6,1, Ian Hinder7,1, Harald P. Pfeiffer1, Michael Pürrer1, Charles J. Woodford8,9, Michael Boyle10, Lawrence E. Kidder10, Mark A. Scheel11, and Béla Szilágyi12,11

  • 1Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute), Am Mühlenberg 1, Potsdam 14476, Germany
  • 2Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA
  • 3APC, Univ Paris Diderot, CNRS/IN2P3, CEA/Irfu, Obs de Paris, Sorbonne Paris Cité, France
  • 4Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Dolgoprudny, Moscow region, Russia
  • 5Institute for Physics and Astronomy, University of Potsdam, Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 24/25, 14476 Potsdam, Germany
  • 6NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA
  • 7University of Manchester, Sackville Building, Granby Row, Manchester M1 3BU, United Kingdom
  • 8Department of Physics 60 St. George Street, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H8, Canada
  • 9Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, 60 St. George Street, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H8, Canada
  • 10Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA
  • 11Theoretical Astrophysics 350-17, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA
  • 12Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91109, USA

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Issue

Vol. 102, Iss. 4 — 15 August 2020

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