Surrogate model of hybridized numerical relativity binary black hole waveforms

By V. Varma, Scott E. Field, Mark A. Scheel, Jonathan Blackman, Lawrence E. Kidder, Harald P. Pfeiffer. Physical Review D, 2018

191 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Numerical relativity (NR) simulations provide the most accurate binary black hole gravitational waveforms, but are prohibitively expensive for applications such as parameter estimation. Surrogate models of NR waveforms have been shown to be both fast and accurate. However, NR-based surrogate models are limited by the training waveforms’ length, which is typically about 20 orbits before merger. We remedy this by hybridizing the NR waveforms using both post-Newtonian and effective one-body waveforms for the early inspiral. We present NRHybSur3dq8, a surrogate model for hybridized nonprecessing numerical relativity waveforms, that is valid for the entire LIGO band (starting at 20 Hz) for stellar mass binaries with total masses as low as 2.25 M⊙. We include the l ≤ 4 and (5, 5) spin-weighted spherical harmonic modes but not the (4, 1) or (4, 0) modes. This model has been trained against hybridized waveforms based on 104 NR waveforms with mass ratios q ≤ 8, and |χ_(1z)|,|χ_(2z)| ≤ 0.8, where χ_(1z) (χ_(2z)) is the spin of the heavier (lighter) black hole in the direction of orbital angular momentum. The surrogate reproduces the hybrid waveforms accurately, with mismatches ≲ 3×10^(−4) over the mass range 2.25 M⊙ ≤ M ≤ 300 M⊙. At high masses (M ≳ 40 M⊙), where the merger and ringdown are more prominent, we show roughly 2 orders of magnitude improvement over existing waveform models. We also show that the surrogate works well even when extrapolated outside its training parameter space range, including at spins as large as 0.998. Finally, we show that this model accurately reproduces the spheroidal-spherical mode mixing present in the NR ringdown signal.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3fb31b6e2fd3ee7d2c469fe28ed8e55092549ccd

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Citations in the corpus

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”
Black Hole Ringdown: The Importance of Overtones (2019, result): “Repeating the above analysis on roughly 80 additional waveforms in the SXS catalog with aligned spins and mass ratios up to 8 [39,52] yields similar results, with a median value of ε ∼ 10−3.”