Comparison of post-Newtonian templates for compact binary inspiral signals in gravitational-wave detectors

By A. Buonanno, B. Iyer, E. Ochsner, Yi Pan, B. Sathyaprakash. 2009

366 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The two-body dynamics in general relativity has been solved perturbatively using the post-Newtonian (PN) approximation. The evolution of the orbital phase and the emitted gravitational radiation are now known to a rather high order up to O(v{sup 8}), v being the characteristic velocity of the binary. The orbital evolution, however, cannot be specified uniquely due to the inherent freedom in the choice of parameter used in the PN expansion, as well as the method pursued in solving the relevant differential equations. The goal of this paper is to determine the (dis)agreement between different PN waveform families in the context of initial and advanced gravitational-wave detectors. The waveforms employed in our analysis are those that are currently used by Initial LIGO/Virgo, that is, the time-domain PN models TaylorT1, TaylorT2, TaylorT3, the Fourier-domain representation TaylorF2 (or stationary phase approximant), and the effective-one-body model, and two more recent models, TaylorT4 and TaylorEt. For these models we examine their overlaps with one another for a number of different binaries at 2PN, 3PN, and 3.5PN orders to quantify their differences. We then study the overlaps of these families with the prototype effective-one-body family, currently used by Initial LIGO, calibrated to numerical-relativity simulations to help usmore » decide whether there exist preferred families, in terms of detectability and computational cost, that are the most appropriate as search templates. We conclude that as long as the total mass remains less than a certain upper limit M{sub crit}, all template families at 3.5PN order (except TaylorT3 and TaylorEt) are equally good for the purpose of detection. The value of M{sub crit} is found to be {approx}12M{sub {center_dot}} for Initial, Enhanced, and Advanced LIGO. From a purely computational point of view, we recommend that 3.5PN TaylorF2 be used below M{sub crit} and that the effective-one-body model calibrated to numerical-relativity simulations be used for total binary mass M>M{sub crit}.« less

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/22f9ef857477901dc7e07fb42a62d85ade31d566

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Citations in the corpus

GWTC-1: A Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog of Compact Binary Mergers Observed by LIGO and Virgo during the First and Second Observing Runs (2018, background): “[36] Alessandra Buonanno, Bala Iyer, Evan Ochsner, Yi Pan, and B.”
Surrogate model of hybridized numerical relativity binary black hole waveforms (2018, background): “Therefore, even though TaylorT3 is known to be less accurate than some other approximants [98], its speed makes it ideal for our purpose as we only need it to capture the general trend.”
The MBTA pipeline for detecting compact binary coalescences in the third LIGO–Virgo observing run (2020, neutral): “125 101102 [21] A. Buonanno et al. 2009 Phys.”
The Gravitational-Wave Physics (2017, neutral): “GW models in which the GWform is expressed in time domain include TaylorT2, TaylorT4 and others [149].”
Black-hole binaries, gravitational waves, and numerical relativity (2010, methodology): “Several other formulas have been suggested (Buonanno et al., 2008; Rezzolla, 2009; Rezzolla et al., 2008a,b; Tichy and Marronetti, 2008), each in good agreement with some subset of available numerical data.”