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Published July 7, 2011 | public
Journal Article

11-orbit inspiral of a mass ratio 4:1 black-hole binary

Abstract

We analyse an 11-orbit inspiral of a non-spinning black-hole binary with mass ratio q ≡ M_(1)/M_(2) = 4. The numerically obtained gravitational waveforms are compared with post-Newtonian (PN) predictions including several subdominant multipoles up to multipolar indices (l = 5, m = 5). We find that (i) numerical and post-Newtonian predictions of the phase of the (2, 2) mode accumulate a phase difference of about 0.35 rad at the PN cut-off frequency Mω = 0.1 for the Taylor T1 approximant when numerical and PN waveforms are matched over a window in the early inspiral phase; (ii) in contrast to previous studies of equal mass and specific spinning binaries, we find the Taylor T4 approximant to agree less well with numerical results, provided the latter are extrapolated to infinite extraction radius; (iii) extrapolation of gravitational waveforms to infinite extraction radius is particularly important for subdominant multipoles with l ≠ m; (iv) 3PN terms in post-Newtonian multipole expansions significantly improve the agreement with numerical predictions for subdominant multipoles.

Additional Information

© 2011 IOP Publishing Ltd. Received 14 December 2010; in final form 19 March 2011; Published 16 June 2011. We thank Emanuele Berti for valuable discussions. CFS and US acknowledge support from the Ramón y Cajal Programme of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (MEC). US acknowledges support by FCT-Portugal through Project no PTDC/FIS/098025/2008, by grants from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation to Caltech and by NSF grants PHY-0601459, PHY-0652995, PHY-0960291. DM acknowledges support by the DFG Research Training Group 1523 'Quantum and Gravitational Field'. CFS acknowledges support from a Marie Curie International Reintegration Grant no MIRG-CT-2007-205005/PHY within the 7th European Community Framework Programme (EU-FP7) and contracts ESP2007-61712 (Spanish Ministry of Education and Science) and no FIS2008-06078-C03-01/FIS (Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation). This work was supported by allocations through the TeraGrid Advanced Support Program under Grant nos PHY-090003 and AST-100021 on the NICS Kraken and SDSC Trestles clusters, by an allocation through the Centro de Supercomputación de Galicia (CESGA) under project no ICTS-2009-40 and Grant DECI-6 DyBHo by the EU-FP7 DEISA. This work was supported in part by DFG grant SFB/Transregio 7 'Gravitational Wave Astronomy' and the DLR (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft und Raumfahrt). BAM simulations were performed at HLRB2 of LRZ Munich.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023