High-accuracy comparison of numerical relativity simulations with post-Newtonian expansions
By M. Boyle, Duncan A. Brown, Lawrence E. Kidder, A. Mroué, Harald P. Pfeiffer, Mark A. Scheel, G. B. Cook, Saul A. Teukolsky. 2007
258 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Numerical simulations of 15 orbits of an equal-mass binary black-hole system are presented. Gravitational waveforms from these simulations, covering more than 30 cycles and ending about 1.5 cycles before merger, are compared with those from quasicircular zero-spin post-Newtonian (PN) formulae. The cumulative phase uncertainty of these comparisons is about 0.05 radians, dominated by effects arising from the small residual spins of the black holes and the small residual orbital eccentricity in the simulations. Matching numerical results to PN waveforms early in the run yields excellent agreement (within 0.05 radians) over the first ~15 cycles, thus validating the numerical simulation and establishing a regime where PN theory is accurate. In the last 15 cycles to merger, however, generic time-domain Taylor approximants build up phase differences of several radians. But, apparently by coincidence, one specific post-Newtonian approximant, TaylorT4 at 3.5PN order, agrees much better with the numerical simulations, with accumulated phase differences of less than 0.05 radians over the 30-cycle waveform. Gravitational-wave amplitude comparisons are also done between numerical simulations and post-Newtonian, and the agreement depends on the post-Newtonian order of the amplitude expansion: the amplitude difference is about 6%–7% for zeroth order and becomes smaller for increasing order. A newly derived 3.0PN amplitude correction improves agreement significantly (<1% amplitude difference throughout most of the run, increasing to 4% near merger) over the previously known 2.5PN amplitude terms.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a8a241ece35802cc13df3c2a9608906fecf0abc6
How researchers see this paper
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
- B. Kelly
- J. V. Meter
- J. Centrella
- John G. Baker
- Bernard F. Schutz
- T. Damour
- Mark A. Scheel
- Lawrence E. Kidder
In Nuclear and High Energy Physics
- T. Damour
- J. Centrella
- J. V. Meter
- B. Kelly
- John G. Baker
- Mark A. Scheel
- Lawrence E. Kidder
- B. Sathyaprakash
Citations in the corpus
- Black-hole binaries, gravitational waves, and numerical relativity (2010, methodology): “Alternatively, the spectral approach may be used, in which coefficients of an expansion in basis functions are computed to some order, on a number of collocation points comparable to the number of basis modes, from which the derivatives are then obtained analytically (Boyle et al., 2007b).”
- Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology with Gravitational Waves (2009, background): “Detailed comparisons [137, 284, 88] show that we should be able to deploy the analytical templates from EOB [100, 135, 138, 139] (and other approximants [22]) that better fit the numerical data in our searches.”
- Surrogate models for precessing binary black hole simulations with unequal masses (2019, background): “5PN SpinTaylorT4 [89, 97, 98] — until we reach the domain of validity of the more accurate NRSur7dq4 (t = −4300M from the peak).”
- Gravitational self-force in a Schwarzschild background and the effective one-body formalism (2009, methodology): “This suggests that the information coming from the ν ≪ 1 GSF study of the LSO is able to break the degeneracy among a5 and a6 left after tuning the two-parameter EOB (a5, a6) waveform to equal-mass (ν = 1 4 ) NR data [36].”