The SXS collaboration catalog of binary black hole simulations

Abstract

Accurate models of gravitational waves from merging black holes are necessary for detectors to observe as many events as possible while extracting the maximum science. Near the time of merger, the gravitational waves from merging black holes can be computed only using numerical relativity. In this paper, we present a major update of the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) Collaboration catalog of numerical simulations for merging black holes. The catalog contains 2018 distinct configurations (a factor of 11 increase compared to the 2013 SXS catalog), including 1426 spin-precessing configurations, with mass ratios between 1 and 10, and spin magnitudes up to 0.998. The median length of a waveform in the catalog is 39 cycles of the dominant = m = 2 gravitational-wave mode, with the shortest waveform containing 7.0 cycles and the longest 351.3 cycles. We discuss improvements such as correcting for moving centers of mass and extended coverage of the parameter space. We also present a thorough analysis of numerical errors, finding typical truncation errors corresponding to a waveform mismatch of ∼ 10 −4 . The simulations provide remnant masses and spins with uncertainties of 0.03% and 0.1% (90 th percentile), about an order of magnitude better than analytical models for remnant properties. The full catalog is publicly available at https://www.black-holes.org/waveforms . black holes and of the surrounding spacetime [31,32]. Simulations have also been used for visualizations of curved spacetime [33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40], investigations of spin quantities [41], and the relaxation of spacetime to the Kerr solution following merger [42][43][44]. The motion of the black hole horizons and horizon curvature quantities have been used to explore eccentric dynamics [45][46][47][48], spin precession [49][50][51][52], and the first law of binary black hole mechanics [53][54][55][56][57]. These in turn have been compared to analytic post-Newtonian and self-force approximations (see also [58][59][60]), mapping out the bounds of validity of these approximations.A key application of BBH simulations is the accurate modeling of gravitational waves emitted by these systems during their late inspiral, merger, and final ringdown. Waveforms extracted from BBH simulations are essential for analyzing observed gravitational-wave signals from black hole binaries. Indeed, all BBH observations by LIGO and Virgo were analyzed using waveform families that rely on numerical relativity for their construction, most notably effective-one-body waveform models [61-65] and phenomenological waveform models [66][67][68]. Numerical simulations are also central in validating such waveform models [69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76], and were used to validate GW searches [77][78][79]. Waveforms from numerical relativity are also used directly in parameter estimation [80,81], to construct template banks [82], and to construct waveform families without intermediate analytical models, using methods such as reduced order modeling [83][84][85][86]. Today's simula...

Surrogate models for precessing binary black hole simulations with unequal masses

“…The start time of these simulations varies between 4693M and 5234M before the peak of the waveform amplitude, where M = m 1 + m 2 is the total Christodoulou mass measured close to the beginning of the simulation at the "relaxation time" [84]. The initial orbital parameters are chosen through an iterative procedure [85] such that the orbits are quasicircular; the largest eccentricity for these simulations is 9.8 × 10 −4 , while the median value is 3.8 × 10 −4 .…”

“…The waveform is extracted at several extraction spheres at varying finite radii from the origin and then extrapolated to future null infinity [84,86]. Then the extrapolated waveforms are corrected to account for the initial drift of the center of mass [87,88].…”

Forecasts for detecting the gravitational-wave memory effect with Advanced LIGO and Virgo

“…This model can be used to generate waveforms from BBHs with mass ratios q in the range q = m 1 /m 2 ≤ 8 and with aligned spins with magnitudes |χ 1z |, |χ 2z | ≤ 0.8. The model was built from a catalog of spinning, non-precessing numerical relativity (NR) simulations [43] that were "hybridized" [44] with post-Newtonian (PN) (see e.g. the review article [45] and references therein) and effective-one-body (EOB) waveforms [46,47].…”

Test black holes, scattering amplitudes, and perturbations of Kerr spacetime

“…The early successes of gravitational-wave (GW) astronomy have relied on highly accurate solutions to the binary black hole problem in general relativity (GR), obtained both from intensive numerical simulations (see e.g. [1]) and, with overlapping domains of validity, from highorder calculations in the weak-field-slow-motion post-Newtonian (PN) approximation [2,3], along with approaches to combining, interpolating and extrapolating these two crucial sources of information. The latter include effective-one-body models [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12], which have recently been linked to effective-one-body equivalences (simple maps from test-body motion in a stationary black hole background to arbitrary-mass-ratio two-body motion) which include and exactly resum infinite series of certain terms (with gauge-invariant information content) in the PN expansion, using only the Schwarzschild or Kerr metric and mappings or identifications motivated by special-relativistic geometry and kinematics for asymptotic scattering states [13][14][15][16].…”