Catalog of precessing black-hole-binary numerical-relativity simulations

Creators: Hamilton, Eleanor; Fauchon-Jones, Edward; Hannam, Mark; Hoy, Charlie; Kalaghatgi, Chinmay; London, Lionel; Thompson, Jonathan E.; Yeeles, Dave; Ghosh, Shrobana; Khan, Sebastian; Kolitsidou, Panagiota; Vano-Vinuales, Alex

Abstract

We present a public catalog of numerical-relativity binary-black-hole simulations. The catalog contains datasets from 80 distinct configurations of precessing binary-black-hole systems, with mass ratios up to $_{₂} /_{₁} = 8$ , dimensionless spin magnitudes on the larger black hole up to $|^{\to S₂} | / m₂² = 0.8$ (the small black hole is nonspinning), and a range of five values of spin misalignment for each mass-ratio/spin combination. We discuss the physical properties of the configurations in our catalog, and assess the accuracy of the initial configuration of each simulation and of the gravitational waveforms. We perform a careful analysis of the errors due to the finite resolution of our simulations and the finite distance from the source at which we extract the waveform data and provide a conservative estimate of the mismatch accuracy. We find that the upper limit on the mismatch uncertainty of our waveforms (including multipoles $ℓ \leq 5$ ) is 0.4%. In doing this we present a consistent approach to combining mismatch uncertainties from multiple error sources. We compare this release to previous catalogs and discuss how these new simulations complement the existing public datasets. In particular, this is the first catalog to uniformly cover this parameter space of single-spin binaries and there was previously only sparse coverage of the precessing-binary parameter space for mass ratios $≳ 5$ . We discuss applications of these new data, and the most urgent directions for future simulation work.

Copyright and License

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Steve Fairhurst, Frank Ohme, Vivien Raymond for many useful discussions, Kieran Philips for extensive optimization of the BAM code that resulted in a greater than 30% increase in speed and a much lower memory footprint, and also for his work in testing the code on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Paul Hopkins for wide-ranging cluster support and also assistance in setting up OCI runs, Phil Bates at Oracle for initiating the OCI work and to Phil and his team for extensive technical support and guidance. The authors were supported in part by Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Grant No. ST/V00154X/1 and European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant No. 647839. E. Hamilton was supported in part by Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Grant No. IZCOZ0-189876. L. London was supported at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by National Science Foundation Grant No. PHY-1707549 as well as support from MIT’s School of Science and Department of Physics. A. Vano-Vinuales thanks FCT for financial support through Project No. UIDB/00099/2020. This work used the DiRAC@Durham facility managed by the Institute for Computational Cosmology on behalf of the STFC DiRAC HPC Facility [137]. The equipment was funded by BEIS capital funding via STFC capital Grants No. ST/P002293/1, No. ST/R002371/1 and No. ST/S002502/1, Durham University and STFC operations Grant No. ST/R000832/1. DiRAC is part of the National e-Infrastructure. Additionally, this research was undertaken using the supercomputing facilities at Cardiff University operated by Advanced Research Computing at Cardiff (ARCCA) on behalf of the Cardiff Supercomputing Facility and the HPC Wales and Supercomputing Wales (SCW) projects. We acknowledge the support of the latter, which is part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) via the Welsh Government. This work was also supported in part by Oracle Cloud credits and related resources provided by the Oracle for Research program.

Files

PhysRevD.109.044032.pdf

Files (5.8 MB)

Name	Size	Download all
PhysRevD.109.044032.pdf md5:cb1f28fa487616655ef4aa998fb57209	5.8 MB	Preview Download

Additional details

	All versions	This version
Views	0	0
Downloads	0	0
Data volume	0 Bytes	0 Bytes