Approaching the Post-Newtonian Regime with Numerical Relativity: A Compact-Object Binary Simulation Spanning 350 Gravitational-Wave Cycles

Abstract

We present the first numerical-relativity simulation of a compact-object binary whose gravitational waveform is long enough to cover the entire frequency band of advanced gravitational-wave detectors, such as LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA, for mass ratio 7 and total mass as low as 45.5M_⊙. We find that effective-one-body models, either uncalibrated or calibrated against substantially shorter numerical-relativity waveforms at smaller mass ratios, reproduce our new waveform remarkably well, with a negligible loss in detection rate due to modeling error. In contrast, post-Newtonian inspiral waveforms and existing calibrated phenomenological inspiral-merger-ringdown waveforms display greater disagreement with our new simulation. The disagreement varies substantially depending on the specific post-Newtonian approximant used.

Additional Information

© 2015 American Physical Society. (Received 27 February 2015; revised manuscript received 28 April 2015; published 16 July 2015) We thank Alejandro Bohé for useful discussions. A. B. acknowledges partial support from NSF Grant No. PHY-1208881 and NASA Grant No. NNX12AN10G. T. C. and H. P. gratefully acknowledge support from NSERC of Canada, the Canada Chairs Program, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. T. C. also acknowledges support by NSF Grant No. PHY-1305682 and the Simons Foundation. J. B. gratefully acknowledges support from NSERC of Canada. L. K. gratefully acknowledges support from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation and from NSF Grants No. PHY-1306125 and No. AST-1333129 at Cornell. M. S., B. Sz., and J. B. acknowledge support from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation and from NSF Grants No. PHY-1440083 and No. AST-1333520 at Caltech. Simulations used in this work were computed with the SpEC code [35]. Computations were performed on the Zwicky cluster at Caltech, which is supported by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation and by NSF Grant No. PHY-0960291, on the NSF XSEDE network under Grant No. TG-PHY990007N, on the Orca cluster supported by Cal State Fullerton, and on the GPC supercomputer at the SciNet HPC Consortium [48]. SciNet is funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation under the auspices of Compute Canada, the Government of Ontario, Ontario Research Fund—Research Excellence, and the University of Toronto.

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Submitted - 1502.04953v1.pdf

Published - PhysRevLett.115.031102.pdf

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