No Arabic abstract
In the adiabatic post-Newtonian (PN) approximation, the phase evolution of gravitational waves (GWs) from inspiralling compact binaries in quasicircular orbits is computed by equating the change in binding energy with the GW flux. This energy balance equation can be solved in different ways, which result in multiple approximants of the PN waveforms. Due to the poor convergence of the PN expansion, these approximants tend to differ from each other during the late inspiral. Which of these approximants should be chosen as templates for detection and parameter estimation of GWs from inspiraling compact binaries is not obvious. In this paper, we present estimates of the effective higher order (beyond the currently available 4PN and 3.5PN) non-spinning terms in the PN expansion of the binding energy and the GW flux that minimize the difference of multiple PN approximants (TaylorT1, TaylorT2, TaylorT4, TaylorF2) with effective one body waveforms calibrated to numerical relativity (EOBNR). We show that PN approximants constructed using the effective higher order terms show significantly better agreement (as compared to 3.5PN) with the inspiral part of the EOBNR. For non-spinning binaries with component masses $m_{1,2} in [1.4 M_odot, 15 M_odot]$, most of the approximants have a match (faithfulness) of better than 99% with both EOBNR and each other.
Using effective field theory techniques we calculate the source multipole moments needed to obtain the spin contributions to the power radiated in gravitational waves from inspiralling compact binaries to third Post-Newtonian order (3PN). The multipoles depend linearly and quadratically on the spins and include both spin(1)spin(2) and spin(1)spin(1) components. The results in this paper provide the last missing ingredient required to determine the phase evolution to 3PN including all spin effects which we will report in a separate paper.
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.
The nonlinear aspect of gravitational wave generation that produces power at harmonics of the orbital frequency, above the fundamental quadrupole frequency, is examined to see what information about the source is contained in these higher harmonics. We use an order (4/2) post-Newtonian expansion of the gravitational wave waveform of a binary system to model the signal seen in a spaceborne gravitational wave detector such as the proposed LISA detector. Covariance studies are then performed to determine the ultimate accuracy to be expected when the parameters of the source are fit to the received signal. We find three areas where the higher harmonics contribute crucial information that breaks degeneracies in the model and allows otherwise badly-correlated parameters to be separated and determined. First, we find that the position of a coalescing massive black hole binary in an ecliptic plane detector, such as OMEGA, is well-determined with the help of these harmonics. Second, we find that the individual masses of the stars in a chirping neutron star binary can be separated because of the mass dependence of the harmonic contributions to the wave. Finally, we note that supermassive black hole binaries, whose frequencies are too low to be seen in the detector sensitivity window for long, may still have their masses, distances, and positions determined since the information content of the higher harmonics compensates for the information lost when the orbit-induced modulation of the signal does not last long enough to be apparent in the data.
Within the framework of self-force theory, we compute the gravitational-wave energy flux through second order in the mass ratio for compact binaries in quasicircular orbits. Our results are consistent with post-Newtonian calculations in the weak field and they agree remarkably well with numerical-relativity simulations of comparable-mass binaries in the strong field. We also find good agreement for binaries with a spinning secondary or a slowly spinning primary. Our results are key for accurately modelling extreme-mass-ratio inspirals and will be useful in modelling intermediate-mass-ratio systems.
A frequentist asymptotic expansion method for error estimation is employed for a network of gravitational wave detectors to assess the amount of information that can be extracted from gravitational wave observations. Mathematically we derive lower bounds in the errors that any parameter estimator will have in the absence of prior knowledge to distinguish between the post-Einsteinian (ppE) description of coalescing binary systems and that of general relativity. When such errors are smaller than the parameter value, there is possibility to detect these violations from GR. A parameter space with inclusion of dominant dephasing ppE parameters $(beta, b)$ is used for a study of first- and second-order (co)variance expansions, focusing on the inspiral stage of a nonspinning binary system of zero eccentricity detectible through Adv. LIGO and Adv. Virgo. Our procedure is an improvement of the Cram{e}r-Rao Lower Bound. When Bayesian errors are lower than our bound it means that they depend critically on the priors. The analysis indicates the possibility of constraining deviations from GR in inspiral SNR ($rho sim 15-17$) regimes that are achievable in upcoming scientific runs (GW150914 had an inspiral SNR $sim 12$). The errors on $beta$ also increase errors of other parameters such as the chirp mass $mathcal{M}$ and symmetric mass ratio $eta$. Application is done to existing alternative theories of gravity, which include modified dispersion relation of the waveform, non-spinning models of quadratic modified gravity, and dipole gravitational radiation (i.e., Brans-Dicke type) modifications.