Effective one body multipolar waveform model for spin-aligned, quasi-circular, eccentric, hyperbolic black hole binaries

TL;DR

This paper introduces an improved effective-one-body waveform model for spin-aligned black hole binaries with various orbital configurations, achieving high accuracy and faithfulness across quasi-circular, eccentric, and hyperbolic orbits, validated against numerical relativity data.

Contribution

The model incorporates general Newtonian prefactors and is calibrated with NR simulations, providing accurate waveform predictions for diverse orbital types including eccentric and hyperbolic trajectories.

Findings

Achieves at most 1% unfaithfulness with NR waveforms for quasi-circular orbits.

Maintains less than 1% unfaithfulness for eccentric orbits with initial eccentricity up to 0.2.

Accurately models higher multipoles up to =5 and predicts scattering angles in hyperbolic encounters.

Abstract

Building upon recent work, we present an improved effective-one-body (EOB) model for spin-aligned, coalescing, black hole binaries with generic orbital configurations, i.e. quasi-circular, eccentric or hyperbolic orbits. The model relies on the idea of incorporating general Newtonian prefactors, instead of the usual quasi-circular ones, in both radiation reaction and waveform. The major advance with respect to previous work is that the quasi-circular limit of the model is now correctly informed by numerical relativity (NR) quasi-circular simulation. This provides EOB/NR unfaithfulness for the dominant quadrupolar waveform, calculated with Advanced LIGO noise, at most of the order of $1\%$ over a meaningful portion of the quasi-circular NR simulations calculated by the Simulating eXtreme Spacetime (SXS) collaboration. In the presence of eccentricity, the model is similarly NR-faithful, $\lesssim 1\%$, all over the 28 public SXS NR datasets, with initial eccentricity up to $\simeq 0.2$ , mass ratio up to $q=3$ and dimensionless spin magnitudes as large as $+0.7$. Higher multipoles, up to $\ell=5$ are also reliably modeled through the eccentric inspiral, plunge merger and ringdown. For hyperbolic-like configurations, we also show that the EOB computed scattering angle is in excellent agreement with all currently available NR results.