Degeneracy of gravitational waveforms in the context of GW150914

Abstract

We study the degeneracy of theoretical gravitational waveforms for binary black hole mergers using an aligned-spin effective-one-body model. After appropriate truncation, bandpassing, and matching, we identify regions in the mass--spin parameter space containing waveforms similar to the template proposed for GW150914, with masses $m_1=36_{-4}^{+5}{M}_{\odot }$ and $m_2=29_{-4}^{+4}{M}_{\odot }$, using the cross-correlation coefficient as a measure of the similarity between waveforms. Remarkably high cross-correlations are found across broad regions of parameter space. The associated uncertanties exceed these from LIGO's Bayesian analysis considerably. We have shown that waveforms with greatly increased masses, such as $m_1=70M_{\odot }$ and $m_2=35M_{\odot }$, and strong anti-aligned spins (${\chi }_1=0.95$ and ${\chi }_2=-0.95$) yield almost the same signal-to-noise ratio in the strain data for GW150914.

arXiv commentAccepted for publication in JCAP

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