First Higher-Multipole Model of Gravitational Waves from Spinning and Coalescing Black-Hole Binaries

Paper published by Lionel London, Sebastian Khan, Edward Fauchon-Jones, Cecilio García, Mark Hannam, Sascha Husa, Xisco Jiménez-Forteza, Chinmay Kalaghatgi, Frank Ohme, and Francesco Pannarale in Physical Review Letters.

First Higher-Multipole Model of Gravitational Waves from Spinning and Coalescing Black-Hole Binaries

Gravitational-wave observations of binary black holes currently rely on theoretical models that predict the dominant multipoles (=2,|m|=2) of the radiation during inspiral, merger, and ringdown. We introduce a simple method to include the subdominant multipoles to binary black hole gravitational waveforms, given a frequency-domain model for the dominant multipoles. The amplitude and phase of the original model are appropriately stretched and rescaled using post-Newtonian results (for the inspiral), perturbation theory (for the ringdown), and a smooth transition between the two. No additional tuning to numerical-relativity simulations is required. We apply a variant of this method to the nonprecessing PhenomD model. The result, PhenomHM, constitutes the first higher-multipole model of spinning and coalescing black-hole binaries, and currently includes the (,|m|)=(2,2),(3,3),(4,4),(2,1),(3,2),(4,3) radiative moments. Comparisons with numerical-relativity waveforms demonstrate that PhenomHM is more accurate than dominant-multipole-only models for all binary configurations, and typically improves the measurement of binary properties.

Paper link available below at citation information


Citation:

Lionel London, Sebastian Khan, Edward Fauchon-Jones, Cecilio García, Mark Hannam, Sascha Husa, Xisco Jiménez-Forteza, Chinmay Kalaghatgi, Frank Ohme, and Francesco Pannarale
First Higher-Multipole Model of Gravitational Waves from Spinning and Coalescing Black-Hole Binaries
Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 161102
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.161102
Published data: 19/04/2018

(Figure 3 from the paper. Matches between models and NR)