Inspiral-merger-ringdown waveforms of spinning, precessing black-hole binaries in the effective-one-body formalism

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive method within the effective-one-body framework to generate accurate gravitational waveforms from spinning, precessing black-hole binaries, covering inspiral, merger, and ringdown stages, and validates it against numerical relativity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel procedure for creating precessing waveforms in the EOB formalism that match numerical relativity results without recalibration.

Findings

EOB waveforms agree well with numerical relativity for precessing binaries.

Phase difference at merger is approximately 0.2 radians.

Mismatch with numerical waveforms is below 2% for advanced-LIGO sensitivity.

Abstract

We describe a general procedure to generate spinning, precessing waveforms that include inspiral, merger and ringdown stages in the effective-one-body (EOB) approach. The procedure uses a precessing frame in which precession-induced amplitude and phase modulations are minimized, and an inertial frame, aligned with the spin of the final black hole, in which we carry out the matching of the inspiral-plunge to merger-ringdown waveforms. As a first application, we build spinning, precessing EOB waveforms for the gravitational modes l=2 such that in the nonprecessing limit those waveforms agree with the EOB waveforms recently calibrated to numerical-relativity waveforms. Without recalibrating the EOB model, we then compare EOB and post-Newtonian precessing waveforms to two numerical-relativity waveforms produced by the Caltech-Cornell-CITA collaboration. The numerical waveforms are strongly precessing and have 35 and 65 gravitational-wave cycles. We find a remarkable agreement between EOB and numerical-relativity precessing waveforms and spins' evolutions. The phase difference is ~ 0.2 rad at merger, while the mismatches, computed using the advanced-LIGO noise spectral density, are below 2% when maximizing only on the time and phase at coalescence and on the polarization angle.