No Arabic abstract
When two black holes merge, a tremendous amount of energy is released in the form of gravitational radiation in a short span of time, making such events among the most luminous phenomenon in the universe. Models that predict the peak luminosity of black hole mergers are of interest to the gravitational wave community, with potential applications in tests of general relativity. We present a surrogate model for the peak luminosity that is directly trained on numerical relativity simulations of precessing binary black holes. Using Gaussian process regression, we interpolate the peak luminosity in the 7-dimensional parameter space of precessing binaries with mass ratios $qleq4$, and spin magnitudes $chi_1,chi_2leq0.8$. We demonstrate that our errors in estimating the peak luminosity are lower than those of existing fitting formulae by about an order of magnitude. In addition, we construct a model for the peak luminosity of aligned-spin binaries with mass ratios $qleq8$, and spin magnitudes $|chi_{1z}|,|chi_{2z}|leq0.8$. We apply our precessing model to infer the peak luminosity of the GW event GW190521, and find the results to be consistent with previous predictions.
The properties of precessing, coalescing binary black holes are presently inferred through comparison with two approximate models of compact binary coalescence. In this work we show these two models often disagree substantially when binaries have modestly large spins ($agtrsim 0.4$) and modest mass ratios ($qgtrsim 2$). We demonstrate these disagreements using standard figures of merit and the parameters inferred for recent detections of binary black holes. By comparing to numerical relativity, we confirm these disagreements reflect systematic errors. We provide concrete examples to demonstrate that these systematic errors can significantly impact inferences about astrophysically significant binary parameters. For the immediate future, parameter inference for binary black holes should be performed with multiple models (including numerical relativity), and carefully validated by performing inference under controlled circumstances with similar synthetic events.
Estimates of the source parameters of gravitational-wave (GW) events produced by compact binary mergers rely on theoretical models for the GW signal. We present the first frequency-domain model for inspiral, merger and ringdown of the GW signal from precessing binary-black-hole systems that also includes multipoles beyond the leading-order quadrupole. Our model, {tt PhenomPv3HM}, is a combination of the higher-multipole non-precessing model {tt PhenomHM} and the spin-precessing model {tt PhenomPv3} that includes two-spin precession via a dynamical rotation of the GW multipoles. We validate the new model by comparing to a large set of precessing numerical-relativity simulations and find excellent agreement across the majority of the parameter space they cover. For mass ratios $<5$ the mismatch improves, on average, from $sim6%$ to $sim 2%$ compared to {tt PhenomPv3} when we include higher multipoles in the model. However, we find mismatches $sim8%$ for the mass-ratio $6$ and highly spinning simulation. As a first application of the new model we have analysed the binary black hole event GW170729. We find larger values for the primary black hole mass of $58.25^{+11.73}_{-12.53} , M_odot$ (90% credible interval). The lower limit ($sim 46 , M_odot$) is comparable to the proposed maximum black hole mass predicted by different stellar evolution models due to the pulsation pair-instability supernova (PPISN) mechanism. If we assume that the primary ac{BH} in GW170729 formed through a PPISN then out of the four PPISN models we considered only the model of Woosley (2017) is consistent with our mass measurements at the 90% level.
We demonstrate the implementation of a sensitive search pipeline for gravitational waves from coalescing binary black holes whose components have spins aligned with the orbital angular momentum. We study the pipeline recovery of simulated gravitational wave signals from aligned-spin binary black holes added to real detector noise, comparing the pipeline performance with aligned-spin filter templates to the same pipeline with non-spinning filter templates. Our results exploit a three-parameter phenomenological waveform family that models the full inspiral-merger-ringdown coalescence and treats the effect of aligned spins with a single effective spin parameter chi. We construct template banks from these waveforms by a stochastic placement method and use these banks as filters in the recently-developed gstlal search pipeline. We measure the observable volume of the analysis pipeline for binary black hole signals with total mass in [15,25] solar masses and chi in [0, 0.85]. We find an increase in observable volume of up to 45% for systems with 0.2 <= chi <= 0.85 with almost no loss of sensitivity to signals with 0 <= chi <= 0.2. We demonstrate this analysis on 25.9 days of data obtained from the Hanford and Livingston detectors in LIGOs fifth observation run.
After eleven gravitational-wave detections from compact-binary mergers, we are yet to observe the striking general-relativistic phenomenon of orbital precession. Measurements of precession would provide valuable insights into the distribution of black-hole spins, and therefore into astrophysical binary formation mechanisms. Using our recent two-harmonic approximation of precessing-binary signals~cite{Fairhurst:2019_2harm}, we introduce the ``precession signal-to-noise ratio, $rho_p$. We demonstrate that this can be used to clearly identify whether precession was measured in an observation (by comparison with both current detections and simulated signals), and can immediately quantify the measurability of precession in a given signal, which currently requires computationally expensive parameter-estimation studies. $rho_p$ has numerous potential applications to signal searches, source-property measurements, and population studies. We give one example: assuming one possible astrophysical spin distribution, we predict that precession has a one in $sim 25$ chance of being observed in any detection.
In this work we present an extension of the time domain phenomenological model IMRPhenomT for gravitational wave signals from binary black hole coalescences to include subdominant harmonics, specifically the $(l=2, m=pm 1)$, $(l=3, m=pm 3)$, $(l=4, m=pm 4)$ and $(l=5, m=pm 5)$ spherical harmonics. We also improve our model for the dominant $(l=2, m=pm 2)$ mode and discuss mode mixing for the $(l=3, m=pm 2)$ mode. The model is calibrated to numerical relativity solutions of the full Einstein equations up to mass ratio 18, and to numerical solutions of the Teukolsky equations for higher mass ratios. This work complements the latest generation of traditional frequency domain phenomenological models (IMRPhenomX), and provides new avenues to develop computationally efficient models for gravitational wave signals from generic compact binaries.