Enriching the symphony of gravitational waves from binary black holes by tuning higher harmonics

By R. Cotesta, A. Buonanno, A. Boh'e, A. Taracchini, Ian Hinder, S. Ossokine. Physical Review D, 2018

167 citations recorded by the source corpus.

For the first time, we construct an inspiral-merger-ringdown waveform model within the effective-one-body formalism for spinning, nonprecessing binary black holes that includes gravitational modes beyond the dominant $(\ell,|m|) = (2,2)$ mode, specifically $(\ell,|m|)=(2,1),(3,3),(4,4),(5,5)$. Our multipolar waveform model incorporates recent (resummed) post-Newtonian results for the inspiral and information from 157 numerical-relativity simulations, and 13 waveforms from black-hole perturbation theory for the (plunge-)merger and ringdown. We quantify the improved accuracy including higher-order modes by computing the faithfulness of the waveform model against the numerical-relativity waveforms used to construct the model. We define the faithfulness as the match maximized over time, phase of arrival, gravitational-wave polarization and sky position of the waveform model, and averaged over binary orientation, gravitational-wave polarization and sky position of the numerical-relativity waveform. When the waveform model contains only the $(2,2)$ mode, we find that the averaged faithfulness to numerical-relativity waveforms containing all modes with $\ell \leq$ 5 ranges from $90\%$ to $99.9\%$ for binaries with total mass $20-200 M_\odot$ (using the Advanced LIGO's design noise curve). By contrast, when the $(2,1),(3,3),(4,4),(5,5)$ modes are also included in the model, the faithfulness improves to $99\%$ for all but four configurations in the numerical-relativity catalog, for which the faithfulness is greater than $98.5\%$. Using our results, we also develop also a (stand-alone) waveform model for the merger-ringdown signal, calibrated to numerical-relativity waveforms, which can be used to measure multiple quasi-normal modes. The multipolar waveform model can be extended to include spin-precession, and will be employed in upcoming observing runs of Advanced LIGO and Virgo.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Geophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/18b158813446652ee176b2301e9b856a12aceaa0

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Citations in the corpus

Surrogate model of hybridized numerical relativity binary black hole waveforms (2018, methodology): “Figure 7 shows NRHybSur3dq8 and SEOBNRv4HM waveforms for the cases leading to the largest errors in the left panel of Fig.”
Tests of general relativity with the binary black hole signals from the LIGO-Virgo catalog GWTC-1 (2019, methodology): “However, work to improve the analysis on all these fronts is well underway, for instance the inclusion of full spin-precession dynamics [24, 66–69], non-quadrupolar modes [68, 69, 72–74], and eccentricity [52–59] in waveform models, as well as analyses that compare directly with numerical relativity”
GWTC-2: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the First Half of the Third Observing Run (2020, methodology): “IMRPhenomPv3HM (based on IMRPhenomHM [211]) and SEOBNRv4PHM (based on SEOBNRv4HM [212]) both rely on the twisting-up approach described above.”