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arXiv · 1803.02350

Degeneracy of gravitational waveforms in the context of GW150914

James Creswell·Hao Liu·Andrew D. Jackson·Sebastian von Hausegger·Pavel Naselsky
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Abstract

We study the degeneracy of theoretical gravitational waveforms for binary black hole mergers using an aligned-spin effective-one-body model. After appropriate truncation, bandpassing, and matching, we identify regions in the mass--spin parameter space containing waveforms similar to the template proposed for GW150914, with masses $m_1 = 36^{+5}_{-4} M_\odot$ and $m_2 = 29^{+4}_{-4} M_\odot$, using the cross-correlation coefficient as a measure of the similarity between waveforms. Remarkably high cross-correlations are found across broad regions of parameter space. The associated uncertanties exceed these from LIGO's Bayesian analysis considerably. We have shown that waveforms with greatly increased masses, such as $m_1 = 70 M_\odot$ and $m_2 = 35 M_\odot$, and strong anti-aligned spins ($\chi_1=0.95$ and $\chi_2=-0.95$) yield almost the same signal-to-noise ratio in the strain data for GW150914.

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James Creswell, Hao Liu, Andrew D. Jackson, Sebastian von Hausegger, Pavel Naselsky. 2018-03-06. Degeneracy of gravitational waveforms in the context of GW150914. https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516%2F2018%2F03%2F007

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