Waveforms and fluxes: Towards a self-consistent effective one body waveform model for nonprecessing, coalescing black-hole binaries for third generation detectors

TL;DR

This paper improves an Effective-One-Body waveform model for nonprecessing black-hole binaries by incorporating new corrections, resulting in higher self-consistency and better agreement with numerical relativity, crucial for future gravitational wave detectors.

Contribution

The paper introduces Next-to-Quasi-Circular corrections and updates the spin-orbital sector in the TEOBResumS model, enhancing its accuracy and consistency with numerical relativity simulations.

Findings

Maximum unfaithfulness between 10^{-4} and 10^{-3} for most configurations.

Performance degrades to about 5×10^{-3} with increasing effective spin.

Model shows reliable accuracy for third-generation gravitational wave detectors.

Abstract

We present a comprehensive comparison between numerical relativity (NR) angular momentum fluxes at infinity and the corresponding quantity entering the radiation reaction in TEOBResumS, an Effective-One-Body (EOB) waveform model for nonprecessing coalescing black hole binaries on quasi-circular orbits. This comparison prompted us to implement two changes in the model: (i) including Next-to-Quasi-Circular corrections in the $\ell=m$, $\ell\leq 5$ multipoles entering the radiation reaction and (ii) consequently updating the NR-informed spin-orbital sector of the model. This yields a new waveform model that presents a higher self-consistency between waveform and dynamics and an improved agreement with NR simulations. We test the model computing the EOB/NR unfaithfulness $\bar{F}_{\rm EOB/NR}$ over all 534 spin-aligned configurations available through the Simulating eXtreme Spacetime catalog, notably using the noise spectral density of Advanced LIGO, Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer, for total mass up to $500M_\odot$. We find that the maximum unfaithfulness $\bar{F}^{\rm max}_{\rm EOB/NR}$ is mostly between $10^{-4}$ and $10^{-3}$, and the performance progressively worsens up to $\sim 5\times 10^{-3}$ as the effective spin of the system is increased. We perform similar analyses on the \SEOB{} model, that delivers $\bar{F}^{\rm max}_{\rm EOB/NR}$ values uniformly distributed versus effective spin and mostly between $10^{-3}$ and $10^{-2}$. We conclude that the improved TEOBResumS model already represents a reliable and robust first step towards the development of highly accurate waveform templates for third generation detectors.