The NINJA-2 project: detecting and characterizing gravitational waveforms modelled using numerical binary black hole simulations

Creators: Aasi, J.; Abbott, B. P.; Abbott, R.; Abernathy, M. R.; Adhikari, Rana X.; Anderson, R.; Anderson, S. B.; Arai, K.; Araya, M. C.; Austin, L.; Barayoga, J. C.; Barish, B. C.; Billingsley, G.; Black, E.; Blackburn, J. K.; Bork, R.; Brooks, A. F.; Cepeda, C.; Chakraborty, R.; Chalermsongsak, T.; Coyne, D. C.; Dergachev, V.; Drever, R. W. P.; Driggers, J. C.; Ehrens, P.; Etzel, T.; Gushwa, K.; Gustafson, E. K.; Harms, J.; Heptonstall, A. W.; Hodge, K. A.; Ivanov, A.; Jacobson, M.; James, E.; Kalmus, P.; Kanner, J. B.; Kells, W.; King, P. J.; Kondrashov, V.; Korth, W. Z.; Kozak, D. B.; Lazzarini, A.; Lewis, J.; Li, T. G. F.; Libbrecht, K.; Litvine, V.; Mageswaran, M.; Mailand, K.; Maros, E.; Martynov, D.; Marx, J. N.; McIntyre, G.; Meshkov, S.; Osthelder, C.; Pedraza, M.; Phelps, M.; Price, L. R.; Privitera, S.; Quintero, E.; Raymond, V.; Reitze, D. H.; Robertson, N. A.; Rollins, J. G.; Sannibale, V.; Singer, A.; Singer, L.; Smith, M.; Smith, R. J. E.; Smith-Lefebvre, N. D.; Taylor, R.; Thirugnanasambandam, M. P.; Thrane, E.; Torrie, C. I.; Vass, S.; Wallace, L.; Weinstein, A. J.; Whitcomb, S. E.; Williams, R.; Yamamoto, H.; Zhang, L.; Zweizig, J.; Santamaría, L.; Sperhake, U.; Chen, Y.; Gossan, S.; Miao, H.; Moesta, P.; Thorne, K. S.; Vallisneri, M.; Yang, H.; Buchman, L. T.; Reisswig, C.; Scheel, M. A.; Szilágyi, B.; Taylor, N. W.

Abstract

The Numerical INJection Analysis (NINJA) project is a collaborative effort between members of the numerical relativity and gravitational-wave (GW) astrophysics communities. The purpose of NINJA is to study the ability to detect GWs emitted from merging binary black holes (BBH) and recover their parameters with next-generation GW observatories. We report here on the results of the second NINJA project, NINJA-2, which employs 60 complete BBH hybrid waveforms consisting of a numerical portion modelling the late inspiral, merger, and ringdown stitched to a post-Newtonian portion modelling the early inspiral. In a 'blind injection challenge' similar to that conducted in recent Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo science runs, we added seven hybrid waveforms to two months of data recoloured to predictions of Advanced LIGO (aLIGO) and Advanced Virgo (AdV) sensitivity curves during their first observing runs. The resulting data was analysed by GW detection algorithms and 6 of the waveforms were recovered with false alarm rates smaller than 1 in a thousand years. Parameter-estimation algorithms were run on each of these waveforms to explore the ability to constrain the masses, component angular momenta and sky position of these waveforms. We find that the strong degeneracy between the mass ratio and the BHs' angular momenta will make it difficult to precisely estimate these parameters with aLIGO and AdV. We also perform a large-scale Monte Carlo study to assess the ability to recover each of the 60 hybrid waveforms with early aLIGO and AdV sensitivity curves. Our results predict that early aLIGO and AdV will have a volume-weighted average sensitive distance of 300 Mpc (1 Gpc) for 10M_⊙ + 10M_⊙ (50M_⊙ + 50M_⊙) BBH coalescences. We demonstrate that neglecting the component angular momenta in the waveform models used in matched-filtering will result in a reduction in sensitivity for systems with large component angular momenta. This reduction is estimated to be up to ~15% for 50M_⊙ + 50M_⊙ BBH coalescences with almost maximal angular momenta aligned with the orbit when using early aLIGO and AdV sensitivity curves.

Additional Information

© 2014 Institute of Physics. Received 14 January 2014, revised 27 March 2014. Accepted for publication 11 April 2014. Published 20 May 2014. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the United States National Science Foundation for the construction and operation of the LIGO Laboratory, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Max-Planck-Society, and the State of Niedersachsen/Germany for support of the construction and operation of the GEO600 detector, and the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare and the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique for the construction and operation of the Virgo detector. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the support of the research by these agencies and by the Australian Research Council, the International Science Linkages program of the Commonwealth of Australia, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research of India, the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare of Italy, the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, the Conselleria d'Economia Hisenda i Innovaciό of the Govern de les Illes Balears, the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, the FOCUS Programme of Foundation for Polish Science, the Royal Society, the Scottish Funding Council, the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance, The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, OTKA of Hungary, the Lyon Institute of Origins (LIO), the National Research Foundation of Korea, Industry Canada and the Province of Ontario through the Ministry of Economic Development and Innovation, the National Science and Engineering Research Council Canada, the Carnegie Trust, the Leverhulme Trust, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Research Corporation, and the Alfred P Sloan Foundation. We gratefully acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation under NSF grants PHY-1305730, PHY-1212426, PHY-1229173, AST-1028087, DRL-1136221, OCI-0832606, PHY-0903782, PHY-0929114, PHY-0969855, AST-1002667, PHY-0963136, PHY-1300903, PHY-1305387, PHY-1204334, PHY-0855315, PHY-0969111, PHY-1005426, PHY-0601459, PHY-1068881, PHY-1005655, PHY-0653443, PHY-0855892, PHY-0914553, PHY-0941417, PHY-0903973, PHY-0955825, by NASA grants 07-ATFP07-0158, NNX11AE11G, NNX13AH44G, NNX09AF96G, NNX09AF97G, by Marie Curie Grants of the 7th European Community Framework Programme FP7-PEOPLE-2011-CIG CBHEO No. 293412, by the DyBHo-256667 ERC Starting Grant, and MIRG-CT-2007-205005/PHY, and Science and Technology Facilities Council grants ST/H008438/1 and ST/I001085/1. Further funding was provided by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation, NSERC of Canada, the Canada Research Chairs Program, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Ramόn y Cajal Programme of the Ministry of Education and Science of Spain, contracts AYA2010-15709, CSD2007-00042, CSD2009-00064 and FPA2010-16495 of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, the German Research Foundation, grant SFB/Transregio 7, the German Aerospace Center for LISA Germany, and the Grand-in-Aid for Scientific Research (24103006). Computations were carried out on Teragrid machines Lonestar, Ranger, Trestles and Kraken under Teragrid allocations TG-PHY060027N, TG-MCA99S008, TG-PHY090095, TG-PHY100051, TG-PHY990007N, TG-PHY090003, TG-MCA08X009. Computations were also performed on the clusters "HLRB-2' at LRZ Munich, 'NewHorizons' and 'Blue Sky' at RIT (funded by NSF grant nos PHY-1229173, AST-1028087, DMS-0820923 and PHY-0722703), 'Zwicky' at Caltech (funded by NSF MRI award PHY-0960291), 'Finis Terrae' (funded by CESGA-ICTS-2010-200), 'Caesaraugusta' (funded by BSC grant nos AECT-2011-2-0006, AECT-2011-3-0007), 'MareNostrum' (funded by BSC grant nos. AECT-2009-2-0017, AECT-2010-1-0008, AECT-2010-2-0013, AECT-2010-3-0010, AECT-2011-1-0015, AECT-2011-2-0012), 'VSC' in Vienna (funded by FWF grant P22498), 'Force' at GaTech, and on the GPC supercomputer at the SciNet HPC Consortium [150]; SciNet is funded by: the Canada Foundation for Innovation under the auspices of Compute Canada; the Government of Ontario; Ontario Research Fund—Research Excellence; and the University of Toronto.

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