Published February 15, 2024 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

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

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 m/m= 8, dimensionless spin magnitudes on the larger black hole up to |^S|/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 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

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Additional details

Identifiers

ISSN
2470-0029

Funding

Science and Technology Facilities Council
ST/V00154X/1
European Research Council
647839
Swiss National Science Foundation
IZCOZ0-189876
National Science Foundation
PHY-1707549
Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia
UIDB/00099/2020
Science and Technology Facilities Council
ST/P002293/1
Science and Technology Facilities Council
ST/R002371/1
Science and Technology Facilities Council
ST/S002502/1
Durham University
Cardiff University
Science and Technology Facilities Council
ST/R000832/1
European Commission
European Regional Development Fund

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