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Abstract

The anticipated enhancements in detector sensitivity and the corresponding
increase in the number of gravitational wave detections will make it possible
to estimate parameters of compact binaries with greater accuracy assuming
general relativity(GR), and also to carry out sharper tests of GR itself.
Crucial to these procedures are accurate gravitational waveform models. The
systematic errors of the models must stay below statistical errors to prevent
biases in parameter estimation and to carry out meaningful tests of GR.
Comparisons of the models against numerical relativity (NR) waveforms provide
an excellent measure of systematic errors. A complementary approach is to use
balance laws provided by Einstein's equations to measure faithfulness of a
candidate waveform against exact GR. Each balance law focuses on a physical
observable and measures the accuracy of the candidate waveform vis a vis that
observable. Therefore, this analysis can provide new physical insights into
sources of errors. In this paper we focus on the angular momentum balance law,
using post-Newtonian theory to calculate the initial angular momentum,
surrogate fits to obtain the remnant spin and waveforms from models to
calculate the flux. The consistency check provided by the angular momentum
balance law brings out the marked improvement in the passage from
\texttt{IMRPhenomPv2} to \texttt{IMRPhenomXPHM} and from \texttt{SEOBNRv3} to
\texttt{SEOBNRv4PHM} and shows that the most recent versions agree quite well
with exact GR. For precessing systems, on the other hand, we find that there is
room for further improvement, especially for the Phenom models.