Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 0711.2628

Comparing Effective-One-Body gravitational waveforms to accurate numerical data

Thibault Damour·Alessandro Nagar
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

We continue the program of constructing, within the Effective-One-Body (EOB) approach, high accuracy, faithful analytic waveforms describing the gravitational wave signal emitted by inspiralling and coalescing binary black holes (BHs). We present the comparable-mass version of a new, resummed 3PN-accurate EOB quadrupolar waveform recently introduced in the small-mass-ratio limit. We compare the phase and the amplitude of this waveform to the recently published results of a high-accuracy numerical relativity (NR) simulation of 15 orbits of an inspiralling equal-mass binary BHs system performed by the Caltech-Cornell group. We find a remarkable agreement, both in phase and in amplitude, between the new EOB waveform and the published numerical data. More precisely: (i) in the gravitational wave (GW) frequency domain $Mω<0.08$ where the phase of one of the non-resummed ``Taylor approximant'' (T4) waveform matches well with the numerical relativity one, we find that the EOB phase fares as well, while (ii) for higher GW frequencies, $0.08<Mω\lesssim 0.14$, where the TaylorT4 approximant starts to significantly diverge from the NR phase, we show that the EOB phase continues to match well the NR one. We further propose various methods of tuning the two inspiral flexibility parameters, $a_5$ and $v_{\rm pole}$, of the EOB waveform so as to ``best fit'' EOB predictions to numerical data. We find that the maximal dephasing between EOB and NR can then be reduced below $10^{-3}$ GW cycles over the entire span (30 GW cycles) of the simulation. Our resummed EOB amplitude agrees much better with the NR one than any of the previously considered non-resummed, post-Newtonian one.

Explore related subjects

gr-qc

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Thibault Damour, Alessandro Nagar. 2007-12-19. Comparing Effective-One-Body gravitational waveforms to accurate numerical data. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.77.024043

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Electrovacuum Black Hole Uniqueness

We prove the black hole uniqueness conjecture in the axially symmetric, stationary, electrovacuum setting, subject to the refined asymptotic analysis of the associated singular harmonic maps, which includes an analyticity hypothesis at the axes. More precisely, it is shown that any asymptotically flat solution of the Einstein--Maxwell equations in this class, with more than one black hole horizon component is either: Majumdar--Papapetrou, up to a duality rotation, in which case all logarithmic angle defects vanish, or every finite axis rod logarithmic angle defect is strictly negative and hence every interaction force is strictly attractive. The proof extends the singular harmonic map method used for vacuum Kerr uniqueness in [18].

gr-qc↗
arXiv2026

Constraining Modified Mass-to-Horizon Cosmology Through Primordial Inflationary Observables

We investigate slow-roll inflation in a modified cosmological framework inspired by a generalized mass-to-horizon relation (MHR), $M=\gamma {c^2 L^n}/{G}$, where $n$ is a real parameter and $\gamma$ a dimensional constant. Using Padmanabhan's emergence paradigm, we derive the modified Friedmann equations for a flat FRW universe and analyze the dynamics of a canonical scalar field (inflaton) under the slow-roll approximation. We study the resulting inflationary phenomenology for power-law and Starobinsky potentials. For power-law potentials, the MHR modification fails to reconcile these models with current CMB constraints on $r$ and $n_s$. In contrast, Starobinsky inflation exhibits significant sensitivity to deviations from $n=1$. A perturbative analysis ($n=1+\Delta$) yields corrections to inflationary observables. We observe that the scalar power-spectrum normalization, under a fixed-Starobinsky prescription, imposes the stringent constraint $0.960 \lesssim n \lesssim 1.040$ for $N=60$ efolds. This is considerably tighter than spectral-index bounds. Our results establish inflation, particularly Starobinsky-like models, as a sensitive probe of generalized horizon thermodynamics and departures from standard MHR scaling.

gr-qc↗
arXiv2026

Improving the Sensitivity of Gravitational Wave Detection with Weighted Conformal Prediction

In the last decade, kilometre-scale interferometric gravitational-wave detectors have observed hundreds of compact binary mergers, the majority of which are binary black holes. However, the data are noise-dominated, and multiple independent search algorithms (pipelines) are used to enhance sensitivity and improve robustness. Rather than the standard approach of selecting the most significant pipeline output, we combine the outputs from all pipelines using a conformal prediction-based framework to provide statistically rigorous confidence estimates for candidate events. While combining pipelines improves sensitivity and ranking robustness, it requires a principled statistical framework that remains valid as data properties evolve across observing runs. A key challenge is distribution shifts between simulated datasets used for training and calibration and the real, unlabelled, observations used for testing, which can invalidate coverage guarantees and bias confidence estimates. In this work, we address this challenge by incorporating likelihood-ratio reweighting into our conformal prediction framework to account for covariate shift. Using mock datasets containing simulated signals, we demonstrate that weighted conformal prediction restores well-calibrated coverage under covariate shift and increases the confidence of events near the detection threshold, recovering true signals that would otherwise be missed.

gr-qc↗