Gravitational waves from black hole binary inspiral and merger: The span of third post-Newtonian effective-one-body templates

TL;DR

This paper enhances the effective-one-body (EOB) templates for gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers by introducing new parameters, demonstrating their effectiveness in signal detection, and proposing ways to simplify template banks.

Contribution

Introduces seven new flexibility parameters in 3PN EOB templates and shows they effectively span the space of gravitational wave signals from black hole mergers.

Findings

Standard 3PN EOB templates have over 96.5% overlap with all flexible models.

The current template bank is effectual for binary black hole detection.

Potential to reduce template numbers using universal phasing functions.

Abstract

We extend the description of gravitational waves emitted by binary black holes during the final stages of inspiral and merger by introducing in the third post-Newtonian (3PN) effective-one-body (EOB) templates seven new ``flexibility'' parameters that affect the two-body dynamics and gravitational radiation emission. The plausible ranges of these flexibility parameters, notably the parameter characterising the fourth post-Newtonian effects in the dynamics, are estimated. Using these estimates, we show that the currently available standard 3PN bank of EOB templates does ``span'' the space of signals opened up by all the flexibility parameters, in that their maximized mutual overlaps are larger than 96.5%. This confirms the effectualness of 3PN EOB templates for the detection of binary black holes in gravitational-wave data from interferometric detectors. The possibility to drastically reduce the number of EOB templates using a few ``universal'' phasing functions is suggested.