Stability of nonspinning effective-one-body model in approximating two-body dynamics and gravitational-wave emission

作者：Pan Yi^*; Buonanno Alessandra; Taracchini Andrea; Boyle Michael; Kidder Lawrence E; Mroue Abdul H; Pfeiffer Harald P; Scheel Mark A; Szilagyi Bela; Zenginoglu Anil

来源：Physical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology, 2014, 89(6): 061501.

DOI：10.1103/PhysRevD.89.061501

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 similar to 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 similar to 60 cycles, we find that EOB waveforms calibrated against either 30 or 60 cycles will be indistinguishable by the advanced detectors Laser Interferometric Gravitational-wave Observatory (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 the total mass is above 20M(circle dot). The results are not conclusive for the entire parameter space because of current NR errors.

• 出版日期2014-3-5