LIGO Seminar

Binary black hole (BBH) coalescences are one of the most promising sources of gravitational waves (GWs) for Advanced generation detectors. The late inspiral and merger phases of these GW signals carry a large fraction of the power, especially when the total mass of the BBH system is dozens of solar masses or more.  We present a surrogate model for numerical relativity waveforms from non-spinning BBH systems with mass ratios up to 10.  The model generates waveforms with comparable accuracies to the input waveforms, which were generated using the Spectral Einstein Code (SpEC).  The mismatch between the surrogate and SpEC waveforms is less than 1% for all binary orientations even at a total mass of 300 solar masses, and an order of magnitude smaller than mismatches between calibrated effective-one-body and SpEC waveforms. We also present plans to build NR surrogate models for waveforms from spinning and precessing BBH systems.

We plan to broadcast these talks using TeamSpeak.