Faithful Effective-One-Body waveforms of equal-mass coalescing black-hole binaries

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that the Effective-One-Body approach can produce highly accurate gravitational waveforms for equal-mass black hole mergers, closely matching numerical relativity results in phase and amplitude.

Contribution

It provides a detailed comparison showing that resummed 3PN-accurate EOB waveforms agree remarkably well with numerical simulations, confirming EOB's effectiveness in modeling black hole coalescences.

Findings

Phase agreement within ±0.005 GW cycles over 12 cycles

Amplitude matches numerical relativity within 1% up to late inspiral

EOB formalism accurately captures general relativistic waveforms

Abstract

We continue the program of constructing, within the Effective-One-Body (EOB) approach, high-accuracy analytic waveforms describing the signal emitted by inspiralling and coalescing black hole binaries. Here, we compare a recently derived, resummed 3 PN-accurate EOB quadrupolar waveform to the results of a numerical simulation of the inspiral and merger of an equal-mass black hole binary. We find a remarkable agreement, both in phase and in amplitude, with a maximal dephasing which can be reduced below $\pm 0.005$ gravitational-wave (GW) cycles over 12 GW cycles corresponding to the end of the inspiral, the plunge, the merger and the beginning of the ringdown. This level of agreement is shown for two different values of the effective 4 PN parameter a_5, and for corresponding, appropriately "flexed" values of the radiation-reaction resummation parameter v_pole. In addition, our resummed EOB amplitude agrees to better than the 1% level with the numerical-relativity one up to the late inspiral. These results, together with other recent work on the EOB-numerical-relativity comparison, confirm the ability of the EOB formalism to faithfully capture the general relativistic waveforms.