High-accuracy waveforms for binary black hole inspiral, merger, and ringdown

By Mark A. Scheel, M. Boyle, T. Chu, Lawrence E. Kidder, Keith D. Matthews, Harald P. Pfeiffer. 2008

191 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The first spectral numerical simulations of 16 orbits, merger, and ringdown of an equal-mass nonspinning binary black hole system are presented. Gravitational waveforms from these simulations have accumulated numerical phase errors through ringdown of <~0.1 radian when measured from the beginning of the simulation, and <~0.02 radian when waveforms are time and phase shifted to agree at the peak amplitude. The waveform seen by an observer at infinity is determined from waveforms computed at finite radii by an extrapolation process accurate to <~0.01 radian in phase. The phase difference between this waveform at infinity and the waveform measured at a finite radius of r=100M is about half a radian. The ratio of final mass to initial mass is Mf/M=0.951 62±0.000 02, and the final black hole spin is Sf/Mf^2=0.686 46±0.000 04.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7836eeb36cd932ee2c57aa69194e9c6773546f71

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Citations in the corpus

Black-hole binaries, gravitational waves, and numerical relativity (2010, methodology): “Recent comparisons of improved EOB models with high-accuracy numerical results from Scheel et al. (2009) yield differences comparable to numerical errors showing phase agreement within about 0.01 rad through ∼ 30 gravitational-wave cycles (Buonanno et al., 2009b; Damour and Nagar, 2009).”
Measuring the Binary Black Hole Mass Spectrum with an Astrophysically Motivated Parameterization (2018, background): “For example, black holes formed by a binary black hole merger event are expected to have large dimensionless spins, a∼0.7 for equal-mass non-spinning pre-merger black holes (Scheel et al. 2009).”
Doing Science with eLISA: Astrophysics and Cosmology in the Millihertz Regime (2012, background): “Numerical relativity simulations for equal mass, non spinning black holes find a spin a• = 0.686 46±0.000 04 (Scheel et al., 2009) for the merged black hole, resulting from the angular momentum of the orbit.”
THE FINAL SPIN FROM BINARY BLACK HOLES IN QUASI-CIRCULAR ORBITS (2016, unknown): “(7) with q = 1 and a1 = a2 = 0 yields exactly the final spin afin = 0.68646 ± 0.00004 measured by the NR simulations of Scheel et al. (2009).”
Gravitational Radiation Detection with Laser Interferometry (2013, background): “A combination of extensive analytic meth-ods(Faye et al. , 2012) and high accuracy numerical simulations(Ajith et al. , 2012; Scheel et al. , 2009; Szil´agyi et al. , 2009) have allowed for the calculation of accurate waveforms by which one can search for these binary in-spirals using matched…”