Validating the effective-one-body model of spinning, precessing binary black holes against numerical relativity

By Stanislav Babak, A. Taracchini, A. Buonanno. 2016

158 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In Ref. [1], the properties of the first gravitational wave detected by LIGO, GW150914, were measured by employing an effective-one-body (EOB) model of precessing binary black holes whose underlying dynamics and waveforms were calibrated to numerical-relativity (NR) simulations. Here, we perform the first extensive comparison of such EOBNR model to 70 precessing NR waveforms that span mass ratios from 1 to 5, dimensionless spin magnitudes up to 0.5, generic spin orientations, and length of about 20 orbits. We work in the observer's inertial frame and include all $\ell=2$ modes in the gravitational-wave polarizations. We introduce new prescriptions for the EOB ringdown signal concerning its spectrum and time of onset. For total masses between 10Msun and 200Msun, we find that precessing EOBNR waveforms have unfaithfulness within about 3% to NR waveforms when considering the Advanced-LIGO design noise curve. This result is obtained without recalibration of the inspiral-plunge of the underlying nonprecessing EOBNR model. The unfaithfulness is computed with maximization over time and phase of arrival, sky location and polarization of the EOBNR waveform and it is averaged over sky location and polarization of the NR signal. We also present comparisons between NR and EOBNR waveforms in a frame that tracks the orbital precession.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/175bdf6f37fd8378d4e1ec1d602b9f1f440d1d5c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Search for Gravitational Lensing Signatures in LIGO-Virgo Binary Black Hole Events (2019, methodology): “We have also repeated the same calculation employing the waveform family SEOBNRV3 (Pan et al. 2014; Taracchini et al. 2014; Babak et al. 2017).”
GWTC-2.1: Deep extended catalog of compact binary coalescences observed by LIGO and Virgo during the first half of the third observing run (2021, methodology): “[62] Stanislav Babak, Andrea Taracchini, and Alessandra Buonanno, “Validating the effective-one-body model of spinning, precessing binary black holes against numerical relativity,” Phys.”
Surrogate models for precessing binary black hole simulations with unequal masses (2019, methodology): “In addition, we also show the errors for the waveform model SEOBNRv3 [24, 31], which also includes spin precession eﬀects 3 .”
GWTC-1: A Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog of Compact Binary Mergers Observed by LIGO and Virgo during the First and Second Observing Runs (2018, methodology): “For analyses of BBH systems in this catalog, we use two waveform models [248]: an effective precession model (IMRPhenomPv2) [25,26,49] using the effective precession parameter χp and a full precession model (SEOBNRv3) [27,28,30] which includes generic two-spin inspiral precession dynamics.”
Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2018, methodology): “…albeit differently: IMRPhenomPv2(Hannam et al. 2014; Husa et al. 2016; Khan et al. 2016), which includes an effective representation(Schmidt et al. 2015) of precession effects, and SEOBNRv3(Pan et al. 2014; Taracchini et al. 2014; Babak et al. 2017), which incorporates all spin degrees of freedom.”
GWTC-2: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the First Half of the Third Observing Run (2020, methodology): “8−22.4 M⊙, where we average over SEOBNRv4PHM, NRSur7dq4, and IMRPhenomPv3HM waveform families.”