Published April 15, 2025 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

Universal phenomenological relations between spherical harmonic modes in nonprecessing eccentric binary black hole merger waveforms

  • 1. ROR icon University of California, Santa Barbara
  • 2. ROR icon California Institute of Technology

Abstract

Using publicly available numerical relativity (NR) simulations for nonspinning eccentric binary black hole (BBH) mergers, [Tousif Islam, Straightforward mode hierarchy in eccentric binary black hole mergers and associated waveform model, arXiv:2403.15506.] demonstrated that the eccentricity-induced modulations in the amplitudes and frequencies of different spherical harmonic modes are mutually consistent and can be modeled using a single time series modulation. We extend the validity of the results to all nonprecessing binaries by using 83 NR simulations from the SXS, RIT, and MAYA catalogs for aligned-spin eccentric BBH mergers with mass ratios ranging from 1∶1 to 1∶4. Based on these phenomenological relations, we provide a framework named gwnrxhme to compute multimodal eccentric nonprecessing waveforms using two inputs: quadrupolar eccentric waveforms, and the corresponding multimodal quasicircular nonprecessing waveforms. Furthermore, we compute an overall degree of departure in SXS, RIT, and MAYA NR data from these relations and find that SXS NR simulations generally adhere to these relations more strictly than RIT and MAYA data. We also show that these relations can offer a cost-effective way to filter out noisy higher-order spherical harmonic modes extracted from NR data. Our framework is publicly available through the gwmodels package.

Copyright and License (English)

© 2025 American Physical Society.

Acknowledgement (English)

We are grateful to the SXS collaboration, RIT NR group and MAYA collaboration for maintaining publicly available catalog of NR simulations which has been used in this study. We thank Scott Field, Gaurav Khanna, Deborah Ferguson, Vijay Varma, Chandra Kant Mishra, Prayush Kumar, and Saul Teukolsky for helpful discussions, and Shrobana Ghosh for comments and suggestions on the initial draft. This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. NSF PHY-2309135 and the Simons Foundation (216179, LB). T. V. acknowledges support from NSF Grants No. 2012086 and No. 2309360, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation through Grant No. FG-2023-20470, the BSF through Award No. 2022136, and the Hellman Family Faculty Fellowship. Use was made of computational facilities purchased with funds from the National Science Foundation (CNS-1725797) and administered by the Center for Scientific Computing (CSC). The C. S. C. is supported by the California NanoSystems Institute and the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC; NSF DMR 2308708) at UC Santa Barbara.

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Additional details

Related works

References
Discussion Paper: arXiv:2403.15506 (arXiv)

Funding

National Science Foundation
PHY-2309135
National Science Foundation
2012086
National Science Foundation
2309360
National Science Foundation
CNS-1725797
Simons Foundation
216179
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
FG-2023-20470

Dates

Available
2025-04-17
Published online

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA)
Publication Status
Published