Accounting for numerical-relativity calibration uncertainty in gravitational-wave modeling and inference

Abstract

The increasing sensitivity of current and upcoming gravitational-wave (GW) detectors poses stringent requirements on the accuracy of the GW models used for data analysis. If these requirements are not met, systematic errors could dominate over statistical uncertainties, hindering our ability to extract astrophysical and cosmological information, and conduct precise tests of General Relativity. In this work, we present a novel method to mitigate the impact of waveform-systematic errors, by incorporating and marginalizing over waveform-uncertainty estimates, which are modeled as probability distributions for the numerical-relativity calibration parameters of effective-one-body waveform models. By analyzing simulated GW signals of loud ``golden'' binary-black-hole systems, we show that our method significantly reduces biases in the recovered parameters, highlighting its potential to improve the robustness of GW parameter estimation with upcoming observing runs and next-generation ground-based facilities, such as the Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer.

v2: matches version published in Phys. Rev. D

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