Improved gravitational waveforms from spinning black hole binaries

Abstract

The standard post-Newtonian approximation to gravitational waveforms, called T-approximants, from non-spinning black hole binaries are known not to be sufficiently accurate close to the last stable orbit of the system. A new approximation, called P-approximants, is believed to improve the accuracy of the waveforms rendering them applicable up to the last stable orbit. In this study we apply P-approximants to the case of a test-particle in equatorial orbit around a Kerr black hole parameterized by a spin parameter q that takes values between -1 and 1. In order to assess the performance of the two approximants we measure their effectualness (i.e. larger overlaps with the exact signal), and faithfulness (i.e. smaller biases while measuring the parameters of the signal) with the exact (numerical) waveforms. We find that in the case of prograde orbits, that is orbits whose angular momentum is in the same sense as the spin angular momentum of the black hole, T-approximant templates obtain an effectualness of ~ 0.99 for spins q < 0.75. For 0.75 < q < 0.95, the effectualness drops to about 0.82. The P-approximants achieve effectualness of > 0.99 for all spins up to q = 0.95. The bias in the estimation of parameters is much lower in the case of P-approximants than T-approximants. We find that P-approximants are both effectual and faithful and should be more effective than T-approximants as a detection template family when q>0. For q<0 both T- and P-approximants perform equally well so that either of them could be used as a detection template family.

23 pages, 2 Tables and 18 Figures

References in corpus (3)

• Detecting gravitational waves from precessing binaries of spinning compact objects: Adiabatic limit
• A physical template family for gravitational waves from precessing binaries of spinning compact objects: Application to single-spin binaries
• Gravitational waves from black hole binary inspiral and merger: The span of third post-Newtonian effective-one-body templates

Cited by in corpus (9)

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• Numerical black hole initial data with low eccentricity based on post-Newtonian orbital parameters
• Pade Approximants of the Green Function in Spherically Symmetric Spacetimes
• Ineffectiveness of Padé resummation techniques in post-Newtonian approximations
• A New Template Family For The Detection Of Gravitational Waves From Comparable Mass Black Hole Binaries
• Modelling the post-Newtonian test-mass gravitational wave flux function for compact binary systems using Chebyshev polynomials
• The Cauchy convergence of T and P-approximant templates for test-mass Kerr binary systems