English

# Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Journal Article

#### Enriching the Symphony of Gravitational Waves from Binary Black Holes by Tuning Higher Harmonics

##### MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons127862

Buonanno,  Alessandra
Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity, AEI-Golm, MPI for Gravitational Physics, Max Planck Society;

/persons/resource/persons192097

Bohé,  Alejandro
Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity, AEI-Golm, MPI for Gravitational Physics, Max Planck Society;

/persons/resource/persons192127

Taracchini,  Andrea
Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity, AEI-Golm, MPI for Gravitational Physics, Max Planck Society;

/persons/resource/persons20659

Hinder,  Ian
Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity, AEI-Golm, MPI for Gravitational Physics, Max Planck Society;

/persons/resource/persons192111

Ossokine,  Serguei
Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity, AEI-Golm, MPI for Gravitational Physics, Max Planck Society;

##### External Ressource
No external resources are shared

1803.10701.pdf
(Preprint), 2MB

##### Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
##### Citation

Cotesta, R., Buonanno, A., Bohé, A., Taracchini, A., Hinder, I., & Ossokine, S. (2018). Enriching the Symphony of Gravitational Waves from Binary Black Holes by Tuning Higher Harmonics. Physical Review D, 98(8): 084028. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.98.084028.

Cite as: http://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0001-4095-E
##### Abstract
For the first time, we construct an inspiral-merger-ringdown waveform model within the effective-one-body formalism for spinning, nonprecessing binary black holes that includes gravitational modes beyond the dominant $(\ell,|m|) = (2,2)$ mode, specifically $(\ell,|m|)=(2,1),(3,3),(4,4),(5,5)$. Our multipolar waveform model incorporates recent (resummed) post-Newtonian results for the inspiral and information from 157 numerical-relativity simulations, and 13 waveforms from black-hole perturbation theory for the (plunge-)merger and ringdown. We quantify the improved accuracy including higher-order modes by computing the faithfulness of the waveform model against the numerical-relativity waveforms used to construct the model. We define the faithfulness as the match maximized over time, phase of arrival, gravitational-wave polarization and sky position of the waveform model, and averaged over binary orientation, gravitational-wave polarization and sky position of the numerical-relativity waveform. When the waveform model contains only the $(2,2)$ mode, we find that the averaged faithfulness to numerical-relativity waveforms containing all modes with $\ell \leq$ 5 ranges from $90\%$ to $99.9\%$ for binaries with total mass $20-200 M_\odot$ (using the Advanced LIGO's design noise curve). By contrast, when the $(2,1),(3,3),(4,4),(5,5)$ modes are also included in the model, the faithfulness improves to $99\%$ for all but four configurations in the numerical-relativity catalog, for which the faithfulness is greater than $98.5\%$. Using our results, we also develop also a (stand-alone) waveform model for the merger-ringdown signal, calibrated to numerical-relativity waveforms, which can be used to measure multiple quasi-normal modes. The multipolar waveform model can be extended to include spin-precession, and will be employed in upcoming observing runs of Advanced LIGO and Virgo.