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General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology, gr-qc
Abstract:
Gravitational-wave observations of binary neutron star systems can provide
information about the masses, spins, and structure of neutron stars. However,
this requires accurate and computationally efficient waveform models that take
<1s to evaluate for use in Bayesian parameter estimation codes that perform
10^7 - 10^8 waveform evaluations. We present a surrogate model of a nonspinning
effective-one-body waveform model with l = 2, 3, and 4 tidal multipole moments
that reproduces waveforms of binary neutron star numerical simulations up to
merger. The surrogate is built from compact sets of effective-one-body waveform
amplitude and phase data that each form a reduced basis. We find that 12
amplitude and 7 phase basis elements are sufficient to reconstruct any binary
neutron star waveform with a starting frequency of 10Hz. The surrogate has
maximum errors of 3.8% in amplitude (0.04% excluding the last 100M before
merger) and 0.043 radians in phase. The version implemented in the LIGO
Algorithm Library takes ~0.07s to evaluate for a starting frequency of 30Hz and
~0.8s for a starting frequency of 10Hz, resulting in a speed-up factor of ~10^3
- 10^4 relative to the original Matlab code. This allows parameter estimation
codes to run in days to weeks rather than years, and we demonstrate this with a
Nested Sampling run that recovers the masses and tidal parameters of a
simulated binary neutron star system.