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Gravitational waves from black hole binary inspiral and merger: The span of third post-Newtonian effective-one-body templates

Thibault Damour·Bala R. Iyer·Piotr Jaranowski·B. S. Sathyaprakash
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Abstract

We extend the description of gravitational waves emitted by binary black holes during the final stages of inspiral and merger by introducing in the third post-Newtonian (3PN) effective-one-body (EOB) templates seven new ``flexibility'' parameters that affect the two-body dynamics and gravitational radiation emission. The plausible ranges of these flexibility parameters, notably the parameter characterising the fourth post-Newtonian effects in the dynamics, are estimated. Using these estimates, we show that the currently available standard 3PN bank of EOB templates does ``span'' the space of signals opened up by all the flexibility parameters, in that their maximized mutual overlaps are larger than 96.5%. This confirms the effectualness of 3PN EOB templates for the detection of binary black holes in gravitational-wave data from interferometric detectors. The possibility to drastically reduce the number of EOB templates using a few ``universal'' phasing functions is suggested.

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Thibault Damour, Bala R. Iyer, Piotr Jaranowski, B. S. Sathyaprakash. 2003-06-04. Gravitational waves from black hole binary inspiral and merger: The span of third post-Newtonian effective-one-body templates. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.67.064028

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