Laying the foundation of the effective-one-body waveform models SEOBNRv5: Improved accuracy and efficiency for spinning nonprecessing binary black holes
Lorenzo Pompili, Alessandra Buonanno, H. Estellés, Mohammed Khalil, Maarten van de Meent, Deyan P. Mihaylov, Serguei Ossokine, M. Pürrer, A. Ramos-Buades, A. K. Mehta, R. Cotesta, S. Marsat, Michael Boyle, Larry Kidder, Harald Pfeiffer, Mark Scheel, Hannes R. Rüter, Nils L. Vu, Reetika Dudi, Sizheng Ma, Keefe Mitman, D. A. Melchor, Sierra Thomas, Jennifer Sánchez
Abstract
We present SEOBNRv5HM, a more accurate and faster inspiral-merger-ringdown gravitational waveform model for quasicircular, spinning, nonprecessing binary black holes within the effective-one-body (EOB) formalism. Compared to its predecessor, SEOBNRv4HM, the waveform model (i) incorporates recent high-order post-Newtonian results in the inspiral, with improved resummations, (ii) includes the gravitational modes $(\ensuremath{\ell},|m|)=(3,2),(4,3)$, in addition to the (2,2), (3,3), (2,1), (4,4), (5,5) modes already implemented in SEOBNRv4HM, (iii) is calibrated to larger mass ratios and spins using a catalog of 442 numerical-relativity (NR) simulations and 13 additional waveforms from black-hole perturbation theory, and (iv) incorporates information from second-order gravitational self-force in the nonspinning modes and radiation-reaction force. Computing the unfaithfulness against NR simulations, we find that for the dominant (2,2) mode the maximum unfaithfulness in the total mass range $10--300{M}_{\ensuremath{\bigodot}}$ is below ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}3}$ for 90% of the cases (38% for SEOBNRv4HM). When including all modes up to $\ensuremath{\ell}=5$ we find 98% (49%) of the cases with unfaithfulness below ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}2}$ (${10}^{\ensuremath{-}3}$), while these numbers reduce to 88% (5%) when using SEOBNRv4HM. Furthermore, the model shows improved agreement with NR in other dynamical quantities (e.g., the angular momentum flux and binding energy), providing a powerful check of its physical robustness. We implemented the waveform model in a high-performance python package (pyseobnr), which leads to evaluation times faster than SEOBNRv4HM by a factor of 10 to 50, depending on the configuration, and provides the flexibility to easily include spin-precession and eccentric effects, thus making it the starting point for a new generation of EOBNR waveform models (SEOBNRv5) to be employed for upcoming observing runs of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA detectors.