Constructing EOB dynamics with numerical energy flux for intermediate-mass-ratio inspirals

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method combining effective one-body dynamics with numerical energy flux from Teukolsky perturbation theory to accurately model intermediate-mass-ratio inspirals and their gravitational waveforms.

Contribution

It develops a new scheme that directly uses numerical energy flux from Teukolsky equations within the EOB framework, improving modeling of IMRIs including nonadiabatic phases.

Findings

Accurately models inspiral and plunge phases for various black hole spins.

Demonstrates improved gravitational waveform predictions.

Validates the method against different black hole configurations.

Abstract

A new scheme for computing dynamical evolutions and gravitational radiations for intermediate-mass-ratio inspirals (IMRIs) based on an effective one-body (EOB) dynamics plus Teukolsky perturbation theory is built in this paper. In the EOB framework, the dynamics essentially affects the resulted gravitational waveform for binary compact star system. This dynamics includes two parts. One is the conservative part which comes from effective one-body reduction. The other part is the gravitational back reaction which contributes to the shrinking process of the inspiral of binary compact star system. Previous works used analytical waveform to construct this back reaction term. Since the analytical form is based on post-Newtonian expansion, the consistency of this term is always checked by numerical energy flux. Here we directly use numerical energy flux by solving the Teukolsky equation via the frequency-domain method to construct this back reaction term. And the conservative correction to the leading order terms in mass-ratio is included in the deformed-Kerr metric and the EOB Hamiltonian. We try to use this method to simulate not only quasi-circular adiabatic inspiral but also the nonadiabatic plunge phase. For several different spinning black holes, we demonstrate and compare the resulted dynamical evolutions and gravitational waveforms.