The SXS collaboration catalog of binary black hole simulations

By M. Boyle, Daniel A. Hemberger, D. Iozzo, G. Lovelace, S. Ossokine, Harald P. Pfeiffer, Mark A. Scheel, L. Stein, Charles J. Woodford, A. Zimmerman and 30 more. Classical and quantum gravity, 2019

392 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Accurate models of gravitational waves from merging black holes are necessary for detectors to observe as many events as possible while extracting the maximum science. Near the time of merger, the gravitational waves from merging black holes can be computed only using numerical relativity. In this paper, we present a major update of the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) Collaboration catalog of numerical simulations for merging black holes. The catalog contains 2018 distinct configurations (a factor of 11 increase compared to the 2013 SXS catalog), including 1426 spin-precessing configurations, with mass ratios between 1 and 10, and spin magnitudes up to 0.998. The median length of a waveform in the catalog is 39 cycles of the dominant gravitational-wave mode, with the shortest waveform containing 7.0 cycles and the longest 351.3 cycles. We discuss improvements such as correcting for moving centers of mass and extended coverage of the parameter space. We also present a thorough analysis of numerical errors, finding typical truncation errors corresponding to a waveform mismatch of ∼10−4. The simulations provide remnant masses and spins with uncertainties of 0.03% and 0.1% (90th percentile), about an order of magnitude better than analytical models for remnant properties. The full catalog is publicly available at www.black-holes.org/waveforms.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/57a3d56f70fd433999d170d9e5fe4d249840ef9a

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Surrogate models for precessing binary black hole simulations with unequal masses (2019, methodology): “The start time of these simulations varies between 4693M and 5234M before the peak of the waveform amplitude, where M = m1 + m2 is the total Christodoulou mass measured close to the beginning of the simulation at the “relaxation time” [84].”
GW231123: A Binary Black Hole Merger with Total Mass 190–265 M⊙ (2025, positive): “…( q > 1 / 3), highly precessing region of parameter space, we perform a simulation study where we simulate a set of signals consisting of highly precessing NR waveforms from the SXS catalog (Boyle et al. 2019; Scheel et al. 2025) and recover with the five waveform models under consideration.”