Investigating the Poor Match among Different Precessing Gravitational Waveforms

Abstract

The sixfold direct detection of gravitational waves opened the era of gravitational wave astronomy. All of these gravitational waves were emitted by black hole or neutron star binaries. The determination of the parameters characterizing compact binaries requires the accurate knowledge of waveforms. Three different waveforms (Spin Dominated, SpinTaylorT4 and Spinning Effective One Body fitted to Numerical Relativity, SEOBNR) are considered in the spin-aligned and precessing cases, in the parameter ranges where the larger spin dominates over the orbital angular momentum. The degeneracy in the parameter space of each waveform is analyzed, then the matches among the waveforms are investigated. Our results show that in the spin-aligned case only the inspiral Spin-dominated and SpinTaylorT4 waveforms agree well with each other. The highest matches of these with SEOBNR are at different parameters as compared to where SEOBNR shows the best match with itself, reflecting SEOBNR being full inspiral-merger-ringdown waveform, with coefficients fitted to numerical relativity, rather than arising from post-Newtonian (PN) calculations. In the precessing case, the matches between the pairs of all waveforms are significantly lower. We identify possible causes of this in (1) the implementation of the angular dynamics carried out at different levels of accuracy for different waveforms; (2) differences in the inclusiveness of the merger process and in the PN coefficients of the inspiral waveforms (Spin-Dominated, SpinTaylorT4) and the full SEOBNR waveform.