Towards models of gravitational waveforms from generic binaries II: Modelling precession effects with a single effective precession parameter

TL;DR

This paper introduces a single effective precession spin parameter, _p, to simplify modeling gravitational waveforms from precessing black-hole binaries, improving accuracy and efficiency in waveform modeling and parameter estimation.

Contribution

The paper proposes and validates a reduced set of spin parameters, notably _p, to effectively model precession effects in gravitational waveforms from generic binaries.

Findings

_p captures dominant precession effects with high accuracy.

Waveform models with three spin parameters can represent generic precessing waveforms.

The approach simplifies parameter estimation and waveform modeling for gravitational wave detection.

Abstract

Gravitational waves (GWs) emitted by generic black-hole binaries show a rich structure that directly reflects the complex dynamics introduced by the precession of the orbital plane, which poses a real challenge to the development of generic waveform models. Recent progress in modelling these signals relies on an approximate decoupling between the non-precessing secular inspiral and a precession-induced rotation. However, the latter depends in general on all physical parameters of the binary which makes modelling efforts as well as understanding parameter-estimation prospects prohibitively complex. Here we show that the dominant precession effects can be captured by a reduced set of spin parameters. Specifically, we introduce a single \emph{effective precession spin} parameter, $\chi_p$, which is defined from the spin components that lie in the orbital plane at some (arbitrary) instant during the inspiral. We test the efficacy of this parameter by considering binary inspiral configurations specified by the physical parameters of a corresponding non-precessing-binary configuration (total mass, mass ratio, and spin components (anti-)parallel to the orbital angular momentum), plus the effective precession spin applied to the larger black hole. We show that for an overwhelming majority of random precessing configurations, the precession dynamics during the inspiral are well approximated by our equivalent configurations. Our results suggest that in the comparable-mass regime waveform models with only three spin parameters faithfully represent generic waveforms, which has practical implications for the prospects of GW searches, parameter estimation and the numerical exploration of the precessing-binary parameter space.