# Distortion of Gravitational-Wave Packets Due to their Self-Gravity

## TL;DR

This paper investigates how the self-gravity of gravitational-wave pulses causes their distortion, affecting waveform accuracy in simulations and observations, especially near black hole mergers.

## Contribution

It introduces a model for GW pulse distortion due to self-gravity, highlighting its dependence on energy, duration, and binary parameters, and its impact on waveform accuracy.

## Key findings

- Self-gravity causes measurable GW waveform distortion.
- Distortion scales with total GW energy and emission duration.
- Waveform errors in simulations can be reduced by accounting for this effect.

## Abstract

When a source emits a gravity-wave (GW) pulse over a short period of time, the leading edge of the GW signal is redshifted more than the inner boundary of the pulse. The GW pulse is distorted by the gravitational effect of the self-energy residing in between these shells. We illustrate this distortion for GW pulses from the final plunge of black hole (BH) binaries, leading to the evolution of the GW profile as a function of the radial distance from the source. The distortion depends on the total GW energy released and the duration of the emission, scaled by the total binary mass, M. The effect should be relevant in finite box simulations where the waveforms are extracted within a radius of <~ 100M. For characteristic emission parameters at the final plunge between binary BHs of arbitrary spins, this effect could distort the simulated GW templates for LIGO and LISA by a fraction of 0.001. Accounting for the wave distortion would significantly decrease the waveform extraction errors in numerical simulations.