Frequency-domain gravitational waves from nonprecessing black-hole binaries. II. A phenomenological model for the advanced detector era Article Swipe
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· 2016
· Open Access
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· DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.93.044007
· OA: W1134494461
We present a new frequency-domain phenomenological model of the\ngravitational-wave signal from the inspiral, merger and ringdown of\nnon-precessing (aligned-spin) black-hole binaries. The model is calibrated to\n19 hybrid effective-one-body--numerical-relativity waveforms up to mass ratios\nof 1:18 and black-hole spins of $|a/m| \\sim 0.85$ ($0.98$ for equal-mass\nsystems). The inspiral part of the model consists of an extension of\nfrequency-domain post-Newtonian expressions, using higher-order terms fit to\nthe hybrids. The merger-ringdown is based on a phenomenological ansatz that has\nbeen significantly improved over previous models. The model exhibits mismatches\nof typically less than 1\\% against all 19 calibration hybrids, and an\nadditional 29 verification hybrids, which provide strong evidence that, over\nthe calibration region, the model is sufficiently accurate for all relevant\ngravitational-wave astronomy applications with the Advanced LIGO and Virgo\ndetectors. Beyond the calibration region the model produces physically\nreasonable results, although we recommend caution in assuming that \\emph{any}\nmerger-ringdown waveform model is accurate outside its calibration region. As\nan example, we note that an alternative non-precessing model, SEOBNRv2\n(calibrated up to spins of only 0.5 for unequal-mass systems), exhibits\nmismatch errors of up to 10\\% for high spins outside its calibration region. We\nconclude that waveform models would benefit most from a larger number of\nnumerical-relativity simulations of high-aligned-spin unequal-mass binaries.\n
