Towards models of gravitational waveforms from generic binaries: II. Modelling precession effects with a single effective precession parameter

By P. Schmidt, Frank Ohme, M. Hannam. 2014

238 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Gravitational waves (GWs) emitted by generic black-hole binaries show a rich structure that directly reflects the complex dynamics introduced by the precession of the orbital plane, which poses a real challenge to the development of generic waveform models. Recent progress in modelling these signals relies on an approximate decoupling between the nonprecessing secular inspiral and a precession-induced rotation. However, the latter depends in general on all physical parameters of the binary which makes modelling efforts as well as understanding parameter-estimation prospects prohibitively complex. Here we show that the dominant precession effects can be captured by a reduced set of spin parameters. Specifically, we introduce a single effective precession spin parameter, χ_p, which is defined from the spin components that lie in the orbital plane at some (arbitrary) instant during the inspiral. We test the efficacy of this parameter by considering binary inspiral configurations specified by the physical parameters of a corresponding nonprecessing-binary configuration (total mass, mass ratio, and spin components (anti)parallel to the orbital angular momentum), plus the effective precession spin applied to the larger black hole. We show that for an overwhelming majority of random precessing configurations, the precession dynamics during the inspiral are well approximated by our equivalent configurations. Our results suggest that in the comparable-mass regime waveform models with only three spin parameters faithfully represent generic waveforms, which has practical implications for the prospects of GW searches, parameter estimation and the numerical exploration of the precessing-binary parameter space.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Geophysics, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6f91c798d4e722b15a78df8136f3f179b8e345b3

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Citations in the corpus

Properties of the Binary Neutron Star Merger GW170817 (2018, background): “Precession effects are commonly quantified by an effective spinprecession parameter χp, which is defined as [133]”
GWTC-2: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the First Half of the Third Observing Run (2020, methodology): “The magnitude of spin precession in the waveform can be partially captured by the effective precession spin parameter χp, which includes the projection of component spin vectors onto the orbital plane [197,198].”
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): “[119] Patricia Schmidt, Frank Ohme, and Mark Hannam, “Towards models of gravitational waveforms from generic binaries II: Modelling precession effects with a single effective precession parameter,” Phys.”
Measuring the Binary Black Hole Mass Spectrum with an Astrophysically Motivated Parameterization (2018, methodology): “For the analysis presented here, the expected signal is calculated using phenomenological approximations to numerical relativity waveforms (Hannam et al. 2014; Schmidt et al. 2015; Smith et al. 2016).”
Prospects for observing and localizing gravitational-wave transients with Advanced LIGO, Advanced Virgo and KAGRA (2013, background): “…holes, or in which the component spin is significant, uncertainties in the waveform model can reduce the sensitivity of the search (Nitz et al. 2013; Harry et al. 2014; Dal Canton et al. 2015; Taracchini et al. 2014; Pan et al. 2014; Schmidt et al. 2015; Khan et al. 2016; Bustillo et al. 2017).”
Binary Black Hole Population Properties Inferred from the First and Second Observing Runs of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2018, background): “…spin effects, 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…”
Prospects for Observing and Localizing Gravitational-Wave Transients with Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (2013, background): “For systems containing black holes, or in which the component spin is significant, uncertainties in the waveform model can reduce the sensitivity of the search [81, 62, 45, 103, 85, 95, 68].”