This Letter presents a publicly available catalog of 174 numerical binary black hole simulations following up to 35 orbits. The catalog includes 91 precessing binaries, mass ratios up to 8∶1, orbital ...eccentricities from a few percent to 10(-5), black hole spins up to 98% of the theoretical maximum, and radiated energies up to 11.1% of the initial mass. We establish remarkably good agreement with post-Newtonian precession of orbital and spin directions for two new precessing simulations, and we discuss other applications of this catalog. Formidable challenges remain: e.g., precession complicates the connection of numerical and approximate analytical waveforms, and vast regions of the parameter space remain unexplored.
We present improvements to the construction of binary black hole initial data used in the Spectral Einstein Code (SpEC). We introduce new boundary conditions for the extended conformal thin sandwich ...elliptic equations that enforce the excision surfaces to be slightly inside rather than on the apparent horizons, thus avoiding extrapolation into the black holes at the last stage of initial data construction. We find that this improves initial data constraint violations near and inside the apparent horizons by about 3 orders of magnitude. We construct several initial data sets that are intended to be astrophysically equivalent but use different free data, boundary conditions, and initial gauge conditions. These include free data chosen as a superposition of two black holes in time-independent horizon-penetrating harmonic and damped harmonic coordinates. We also implement initial data for which the initial gauge satisfies the harmonic and damped harmonic gauge conditions; this can be done independently of the free data, since this amounts to a choice of the time derivatives of the lapse and shift. We compare these initial data sets by evolving them. We show that the gravitational waveforms extracted during the evolution of these different initial data sets agree very well after excluding initial transients. However, we do find small differences between these waveforms, which we attribute to small differences in initial orbital eccentricity, and in initial BH masses and spins, resulting from the different choices of free data. Among the cases considered, we find that superposed harmonic initial data lead to significantly smaller transients, smaller variation in BH spins and masses during these transients, smaller constraint violations, and more computationally efficient evolutions. Finally, we study the impact of initial data choices on the construction of zero-eccentricity initial data.
We develop new strategies to build numerical relativity surrogate models for eccentric binary black hole systems, which are expected to play an increasingly important role in current and future ...gravitational-wave detectors. We introduce a new surrogate waveform model, NRSur2dq1Ecc, using 47 nonspinning, equal-mass waveforms with eccentricities up to 0.2 when measured at a reference time of 5500 M before merger. This is the first waveform model that is directly trained on eccentric numerical relativity simulations and does not require that the binary circularizes before merger. The model includes the (2,2), (3,2), and (4,4) spin-weighted spherical harmonic modes. We also build a final black hole model, NRSur2dq1EccRemnant, which models the mass, and spin of the remnant black hole. We show that our waveform model can accurately predict numerical relativity waveforms with mismatches ≈ 10−3, while the remnant model can recover the final mass and dimensionless spin with absolute errors smaller than ≈ 5 ×10−4M and ≈ 2 ×10−3 respectively. We demonstrate that the waveform model can also recover subtle effects like mode mixing in the ringdown signal without any special ad hoc modeling steps. Finally, we show that despite being trained only on equal-mass binaries, NRSur2dq1Ecc can be reasonably extended up to mass ratio q ≈ 3 with mismatches ≃ 10−2 for eccentricities smaller than ∼ 0.05 as measured at a reference time of 2000 M before merger. The methods developed here should prove useful in the building of future eccentric surrogate models over larger regions of the parameter space.
We improve the accuracy of the effective-one-body (EOB) waveforms that were employed during the first observing run of Advanced LIGO for binaries of spinning, nonprecessing black holes by calibrating ...them to a set of 141 numerical-relativity (NR) waveforms. The NR simulations expand the domain of calibration toward larger mass ratios and spins, as compared to the previous EOBNR model. Merger-ringdown waveforms computed in black-hole perturbation theory for Kerr spins close to extremal provide additional inputs to the calibration. For the inspiral-plunge phase, we use a Markov-chain Monte Carlo algorithm to efficiently explore the calibration space. For the merger-ringdown phase, we fit the NR signals with phenomenological formulae. After extrapolation of the calibrated model to arbitrary mass ratios and spins, the (dominant-mode) EOBNR waveforms have faithfulness-at design Advanced-LIGO sensitivity-above 99% against all the NR waveforms, including 16 additional waveforms used for validation, when maximizing only on initial phase and time. This implies a negligible loss in event rate due to modeling for these binary configurations. We find that future NR simulations at mass ratios ≳4 and double spin ≳0.8 will be crucial to resolving discrepancies between different ways of extrapolating waveform models. We also find that some of the NR simulations that already exist in such region of parameter space are too short to constrain the low-frequency portion of the models. Finally, we build a reduced-order version of the EOBNR model to speed up waveform generation by orders of magnitude, thus enabling intensive data-analysis applications during the upcoming observation runs of Advanced LIGO.
We present a new set of 95 numerical relativity simulations of non-precessing binary black holes (BBHs). The simulations sample comprehensively both black-hole spins up to spin magnitude of 0.9, and ...cover mass ratios 1-3. The simulations cover on average 24 inspiral orbits, plus merger and ringdown, with low initial orbital eccentricities e < 10 − 4 . A subset of the simulations extends the coverage of non-spinning BBHs up to mass ratio q = 10. Gravitational waveforms at asymptotic infinity are computed with two independent techniques: extrapolation and Cauchy characteristic extraction. An error analysis based on noise-weighted inner products is performed. We find that numerical truncation error, error due to gravitational wave extraction, and errors due to the Fourier transformation of signals with finite length of the numerical waveforms are of similar magnitude, with gravitational wave extraction errors dominating at noise-weighted mismatches of ∼ 3 × 10 − 4 . This set of waveforms will serve to validate and improve aligned-spin waveform models for gravitational wave science.
Abstract
Neutrino transport and neutrino−matter interactions are known to play an important role in the evolution of neutron star mergers and of their post-merger remnants. Neutrinos cool remnants, ...drive post-merger winds, and deposit energy in the low-density polar regions where relativistic jets may eventually form. Neutrinos also modify the composition of the ejected material, impacting the outcome of nucleosynthesis in merger outflows and the properties of the optical/infrared transients that they power (kilonovae). So far, merger simulations have largely relied on approximate treatments of the neutrinos (leakage, moments) that simplify the equations of radiation transport in a way that makes simulations more affordable but also introduces unquantifiable errors in the results. To improve on these methods, we recently published a first simulation of neutron star mergers using a low-cost Monte Carlo algorithm for neutrino radiation transport. Our transport code limits costs in optically thick regions by placing a hard ceiling on the value of the absorption opacity of the fluid, yet all approximations made within the code are designed to vanish in the limit of infinite numerical resolution. We provide here an in-depth description of this algorithm, of its implementation in the SpEC merger code, and of the expected impact of our approximations in optically thick regions. We argue that the last is a subdominant source of error at the accuracy reached by current simulations and for the interactions currently included in our code. We also provide tests of the most important features of this code.
Accurate models of gravitational waves from merging binary black holes are crucial for detectors to measure events and extract new science. One important feature that is currently missing from the ...Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) Collaboration's catalog of waveforms for merging black holes, and other waveform catalogs, is the gravitational memory effect: a persistent, physical change to spacetime that is induced by the passage of transient radiation. We find, however, that by exploiting the Bondi-van der Burg-Metzner-Sachs (BMS) balance laws, which come from the extended BMS transformations, we can correct the strain waveforms in the SXS catalog to include the missing displacement memory. Our results show that these corrected waveforms satisfy the BMS balance laws to a much higher degree of accuracy. Furthermore, we find that these corrected strain waveforms coincide especially well with the waveforms obtained from Cauchy-characteristic extraction (CCE) that already exhibit memory effects. These corrected strain waveforms also evade the transient junk effects that are currently present in CCE waveforms. Last, we make our code for computing these contributions to the BMS balance laws and memory publicly available as a part of the python package sxs, thus enabling anyone to evaluate the expected memory effects and violation of the BMS balance laws.
Nonlinearities in Black Hole Ringdowns Mitman, Keefe; Lagos, Macarena; Stein, Leo C ...
Physical review letters,
02/2023, Letnik:
130, Številka:
8
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The gravitational wave strain emitted by a perturbed black hole (BH) ringing down is typically modeled analytically using first-order BH perturbation theory. In this Letter, we show that second-order ...effects are necessary for modeling ringdowns from BH merger simulations. Focusing on the strain's (ℓ,m)=(4,4) angular harmonic, we show the presence of a quadratic effect across a range of binary BH mass ratios that agrees with theoretical expectations. We find that the quadratic (4,4) mode's amplitude exhibits quadratic scaling with the fundamental (2,2) mode-its parent mode. The nonlinear mode's amplitude is comparable to or even larger than that of the linear (4,4) mode. Therefore, correctly modeling the ringdown of higher harmonics-improving mode mismatches by up to 2 orders of magnitude-requires the inclusion of nonlinear effects.
Black-hole-neutron-star mergers resulting in the disruption of the neutron star and the formation of an accretion disk and/or the ejection of unbound material are prime candidates for the joint ...detection of gravitational-wave and electromagnetic signals when the next generation of gravitational-wave detectors comes online. In this paper, we study the impact of the radius of the neutron star and the alignment of the black-hole spin on black-hole-neutron-star mergers within the range of mass ratio currently deemed most likely for field binaries (MsubBH ~ 7MsubNS) and for black-hole spins large enough for the neutron star to disrupt (JsubBH/Msup 2 subBH = 0.9).
We present an improved spectral algorithm for Cauchy-characteristic extraction and characteristic evolution of gravitational waves in numerical relativity. The new algorithms improve spectral ...convergence both at the poles of the spherical-polar grid and at future null infinity, as well as increase the temporal resolution of the code. The key to the success of these algorithms is a new set of high-accuracy tests, which we present here. We demonstrate the accuracy of the code and compare with the existing pittnull implementation.
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