No Arabic abstract
The self-force program aims at accurately modeling relativistic two-body systems with a small mass ratio (SMR). In the context of the effective-one-body (EOB) framework, current results from this program can be used to determine the effective metric components at linear order in the mass ratio, resumming post-Newtonian (PN) dynamics around the test-particle limit in the process. It was shown in [Akcay et al., Phys. Rev. D 86 (2012)] that, in the original (standard) EOB gauge, the SMR contribution to the metric component $g^text{eff}_{tt}$ exhibits a coordinate singularity at the light-ring (LR) radius. In this paper, we adopt a different gauge for the EOB dynamics and obtain a Hamiltonian that is free of poles at the LR, with complete circular-orbit information at linear order in the mass ratio and non-circular-orbit and higher-order-in-mass-ratio terms up to 3PN order. We confirm the absence of the LR-divergence in such an EOB Hamiltonian via plunging trajectories through the LR radius. Moreover, we compare the binding energies and inspiral waveforms of EOB models with SMR, PN and mixed SMR-3PN information on a quasi-circular inspiral against numerical-relativity predictions. We find good agreement between NR simulations and EOB models with SMR-3PN information for both equal and unequal mass ratios. In particular, when compared to EOB inspiral waveforms with only 3PN information, EOB Hamiltonians with SMR-3PN information improves the modeling of binary systems with small mass ratios $q lesssim 1/3$, with a dephasing accumulated in $sim$30 gravitational-wave (GW) cycles being of the order of few hundredths of a radian up to 4 GW cycles before merger.
We compute the periastron advance using the effective-one-body formalism for binary black holes moving on quasi-circular orbits and having spins collinear with the orbital angular momentum. We compare the predictions with the periastron advance recently computed in accurate numerical-relativity simulations and find remarkable agreement for a wide range of spins and mass ratios. These results do not use any numerical-relativity calibration of the effective-one-body model, and stem from two key ingredients in the effective-one-body Hamiltonian: (i) the mapping of the two-body dynamics of spinning particles onto the dynamics of an effective spinning particle in a (deformed) Kerr spacetime, fully symmetrized with respect to the two-body masses and spins, and (ii) the resummation, in the test-particle limit, of all post-Newtonian (PN) corrections linear in the spin of the particle. In fact, even when only the leading spin PN corrections are included in the effective-one-body spinning Hamiltonian but all the test-particle corrections linear in the spin of the particle are resummed we find very good agreement with the numerical results (within the numerical error for equal-mass binaries and discrepancies of at most 1% for larger mass ratios). Furthermore, we specialize to the extreme mass-ratio limit and derive, using the equations of motion in the gravitational skeleton approach, analytical expressions for the periastron advance, the meridional Lense-Thirring precession and spin precession frequency in the case of a spinning particle on a nearly circular equatorial orbit in Kerr spacetime, including also terms quadratic in the spin.
We present TEOBResumS, a new effective-one-body (EOB) waveform model for nonprecessing (spin-aligned) and tidally interacting compact binaries.Spin-orbit and spin-spin effects are blended together by making use of the concept of centrifugal EOB radius. The point-mass sector through merger and ringdown is informed by numerical relativity (NR) simulations of binary black holes (BBH) computed with the SpEC and BAM codes. An improved, NR-based phenomenological description of the postmerger waveform is developed.The tidal sector of TEOBResumS describes the dynamics of neutron star binaries up to merger and incorporates a resummed attractive potential motivated by recent advances in the post-Newtonian and gravitational self-force description of relativistic tidal interactions. Equation-of-state dependent self-spin interactions (monopole-quadrupole effects) are incorporated in the model using leading-order post-Newtonian results in a new expression of the centrifugal radius. TEOBResumS is compared to 135 SpEC and 19 BAM BBH waveforms. The maximum unfaithfulness to SpEC data $bar{F}$ -- at design Advanced-LIGO sensitivity and evaluated with total mass $M$ varying between $10M_odot leq M leq 200 M_odot$ --is always below $2.5 times 10^{-3}$ except for a single outlier that grazes the $7.1 times 10^{-3}$ level. When compared to BAM data, $bar{F}$ is smaller than $0.01$ except for a single outlier in one of the corners of the NR-covered parameter space, that reaches the $0.052$ level.TEOBResumS is also compatible, up to merger, to high end NR waveforms from binary neutron stars with spin effects and reduced initial eccentricity computed with the BAM and THC codes. The model is designed to generate accurate templates for the analysis of LIGO-Virgo data through merger and ringdown. We demonstrate its use by analyzing the publicly available data for GW150914.
Intermediate/Extreme mass ratio inspiral (IMRI/EMRI) system provides a good tool to test the nature of gravity in strong field. We construct the self-force and use the self-force method to generate accurate waveform templates for IMRIS/EMRIs on quasi-elliptical orbits in Brans-Dicke theory. The extra monopole and dipole emissions in Brans-Dicke theory accelerate the orbital decay, so the observations of gravitational waves may place stronger constraint on Brans-Dicke theory. With a two-year observations of gravitational waves emitted from IMRIs/EMRIs with LISA, we can get the most stringent constraint on the Brans-Dicke coupling parameter $omega_0>10^5$.
The detection of gravitational waves and the extraction of physical information from them requires the prediction of accurate waveforms to be used in template banks. For that purpose, the accuracy of effective-one-body (EOB) waveforms has been improved over the last years by calibrating them to numerical-relativity (NR) waveforms. So far, the calibration has employed a handful of NR waveforms with a total length of ~30 cycles, the length being limited by the computational cost of NR simulations. Here we address the outstanding problem of the stability of the EOB calibration with respect to the length of NR waveforms. Performing calibration studies against NR waveforms of nonspinning black-hole binaries with mass ratios 1, 1.5, 5, and 8, and with a total length of ~60 cycles, we find that EOB waveforms calibrated against either 30 or 60 cycles will be indistinguishable by the advanced detectors LIGO and Virgo when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is below 110. When extrapolating to a very large number of cycles, using very conservative assumptions, we can conclude that state-of-the-art nonspinning EOB waveforms of any length are sufficiently accurate for parameter estimation with advanced detectors when the SNR is below 20, the mass ratio is below 5 and total mass is above 20 Msun. The results are not conclusive for the entire parameter space because of current NR errors.
We extend our previous calculation of the quasi-local contribution to the self-force on a scalar particle to general (not necessarily geodesic) motion in a general spacetime. In addition to the general case and the case of a particle at rest in a stationary spacetime, we consider as examples a particle held at rest in Reissner-Nordstrom and Kerr-Newman space-times. This allows us to most easily analyse the effect of non-geodesic motion on our previous results and also allows for comparison to existing results for Schwarzschild spacetime.