SEOBNRv5PHM: Next generation of accurate and efficient multipolar precessing-spin effective-one-body waveforms for binary black holes

Abstract

Spin precession is one of the key physical effects that could unveil the origin of the compact binaries detected by ground- and space-based gravitational-wave (GW) detectors, and shed light on their possible formation channels. Efficiently and accurately modeling the GW signals emitted by these systems is crucial to extract their properties. Here, we present SEOBNRv5PHM, a multipolar precessing-spin waveform model within the effective-one-body (EOB) formalism for the full signal (i.e. inspiral, merger and ringdown) of binary black holes (BBHs). In the non-precessing limit, the model reduces to SEOBNRv5HM, which is calibrated to $442$ numerical-relativity (NR) simulations, 13 waveforms from BH perturbation theory, and non-spinning energy flux from second-order gravitational self-force theory. We remark that SEOBNRv5PHM is not calibrated to precessing-spin NR waveforms from the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes Collaboration. We validate SEOBNRv5PHM by computing the unfaithfulness against 1543 precessing-spin NR waveforms, and find that for 99.8% (84.4%) of the cases, the maximum value, in the total mass range 20-300 $M_\odot$, is below 3% (1%). These numbers reduce to 95.3% (60.8%) when using the previous version of the SEOBNR family, SEOBNRv4PHM, and to 78.2% (38.3%) when using the state-of-the-art frequency-domain multipolar precessing-spin phenomenological IMRPhenomXPHM model. Due to much better computational efficiency of SEOBNRv5PHM compared to SEOBNRv4PHM, we are also able to perform extensive Bayesian parameter estimation on synthetic signals and GW events observed by LIGO-Virgo detectors. We show that SEOBNRv5PHM can be used as a standard tool for inference analyses to extract astrophysical and cosmological information of large catalogues of BBHs.