High-precision ringdown surrogate model for nonprecessing binary black holes
Creators
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1.
University of Mississippi
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2.
California Institute of Technology
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3.
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
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4.
Cornell University
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5.
Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics
Abstract
Highly precise and robust waveform models are required as improvements in detector sensitivity enable us to test general relativity with more precision than ever before. In this work, we introduce a spin-aligned surrogate ringdown model. This ringdown surrogate, nrsur3dq8_rd, is built with numerical waveforms produced using Cauchy-characteristic evolution. In addition, these waveforms are in the super-rest frame of the remnant black hole allowing us to do a correct analysis of the ringdown spectrum. The novel prediction of our surrogate model is complex-valued quasinormal mode (QNM) amplitudes, with median relative errors of 10⁻² −10⁻³ over the parameter space. Like previous remnant surrogates, we also predict the remnant black hole’s mass and spin. The QNM mode amplitude errors translate into median errors on ringdown waveforms of ∼10⁻⁴. The high accuracy and QNM mode content provided by our surrogate will enable high-precision ringdown analyses such as tests of general relativity. Our ringdown model is publicly available through the python package surfinbh
Copyright and License
© 2025 American Physical Society
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank Tousif Islam, Costantino Pacilio, Swetha Bhagwat, Francesco Nobili, and Davide Gerosa for helpful discussions. The work of L. M. Z. was partially supported by the MSSGC Graduate Research Fellowship, awarded through the NASA Cooperative Agreement No. 80NSSC20M0101. L. C. S. was supported by NSF CAREER Award No. PHY-2047382 and a Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship. K. M. was supported by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation and NSF Grants No. PHY-2011968, No. PHY-2011961, No. PHY-2309211, No. PHY-2309231, and No. OAC-2209656 at Caltech. S. E. F. was supported by NSF Grant No. PHY-2110496. V. V. was supported by NSF Grant No. PHY-2309301. S. E. F. and V. V. were supported by UMass Dartmouth’s Marine and Undersea Technology (MUST) research program funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) under Grant No. N00014-23-1-2141. Some calculations were performed with the Wheeler cluster at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), which is supported by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation and by Caltech.
Data Availability
The newly-created data that supports the findings of this article are openly available through the surfinbh package. The data have been deposited on Zenodo:
- V. Varma, L. C. Stein, and D. Gerosa, vijayvarma392/surfinbh: Surrogate Final BH properties (2018), 10.5281/zenodo.1435832.
- J. Blackman et al., Binary black-hole surrogate waveform catalog [Data set] (Zenodo, 2025), 10.5281/zenodo.14919209.
Files
q7sy-g3kl.pdf
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Additional details
Funding
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 80NSSC20M0101
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2047382
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2011968
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2011961
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2309211
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2309231
- National Science Foundation
- OAC-2209656
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2110496
- National Science Foundation
- PHY-2309301
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- Sherman Fairchild Foundation
- California Institute of Technology
- University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
- Office of Naval Research
- N00014-23-1-2141
Dates
- Available
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2025-07-30Published online