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Published November 15, 2015 | Published + Submitted
Journal Article Open

Comparing post-Newtonian and numerical relativity precession dynamics

Abstract

Binary black-hole systems are expected to be important sources of gravitational waves for upcoming gravitational-wave detectors. If the spins are not colinear with each other or with the orbital angular momentum, these systems exhibit complicated precession dynamics that are imprinted on the gravitational waveform. We develop a new procedure to match the precession dynamics computed by post-Newtonian (PN) theory to those of numerical binary black-hole simulations in full general relativity. For numerical relativity (NR) simulations lasting approximately two precession cycles, we find that the PN and NR predictions for the directions of the orbital angular momentum and the spins agree to better than ∼1° with NR during the inspiral, increasing to 5° near merger. Nutation of the orbital plane on the orbital time scale agrees well between NR and PN, whereas nutation of the spin direction shows qualitatively different behavior in PN and NR. We also examine how the PN equations for precession and orbital-phase evolution converge with PN order, and we quantify the impact of various choices for handling partially known PN terms.

Additional Information

© 2015 American Physical Society. Received 5 February 2015; published 9 November 2015. We thank Kipp Cannon, Francois Foucart, Prayush Kumar, Abdul Mroué and Aaron Zimmerman for useful discussions. Calculations were performed with the SpEC code [73].We gratefully acknowledge support from NSERC of Canada, from the Canada Research Chairs Program, and from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. We further gratefully acknowledge support from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation, from National Science Foundation Grants No. PHY-1306125 and No.AST-1333129 at Cornell, and from National Science Foundation Grants No. PHY- 1440083, No. AST-1333520, and No. PHY-1404569 at Caltech. Calculations were performed at the GPC supercomputer at the SciNet HPC Consortium [74]. SciNet is funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) under the auspices of Compute Canada, the Government of Ontario, Ontario Research Fund (ORF)—Research Excellence, and the University of Toronto. Further computations were performed on the Zwicky cluster at Caltech, which is supported by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation and by National Science Foundation Award No. PHY-0960291, and on the National Science Foundation XSEDE network under Grant No. TG-PHY990007N.

Attached Files

Published - PhysRevD.92.104028.pdf

Submitted - 1502.01747v1.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 20, 2023
Modified:
October 25, 2023