Targeted numerical simulations of binary black holes for GW170104

Creators: Healy, J.; Lange, J.; O'Shaughnessy, R.; Lousto, C. O.; Campanelli, M.; Williamson, A. R.; Zlochower, Y.; Calderón Bustillo, J.; Clark, J. A.; Evans, C.; Ferguson, D.; Ghonge, S.; Jani, K.; Khamesra, B.; Laguna, P.; Shoemaker, D. M.; Boyle, M.; García, A.; Hemberger, D. A.; Kidder, L. E.; Kumar, P.; Lovelace, G.; Pfeiffer, H. P.; Scheel, M. A.; Teukolsky, S. A.

Abstract

In response to LIGO's observation of GW170104, we performed a series of full numerical simulations of binary black holes, each designed to replicate likely realizations of its dynamics and radiation. These simulations have been performed at multiple resolutions and with two independent techniques to solve Einstein's equations. For the nonprecessing and precessing simulations, we demonstrate the two techniques agree mode by mode, at a precision substantially in excess of statistical uncertainties in current LIGO's observations. Conversely, we demonstrate our full numerical solutions contain information which is not accurately captured with the approximate phenomenological models commonly used to infer compact binary parameters. To quantify the impact of these differences on parameter inference for GW170104 specifically, we compare the predictions of our simulations and these approximate models to LIGO's observations of GW170104.

Additional Information

© 2018 American Physical Society. Received 15 December 2017; published 23 March 2018. The authors thank S. Husa, C. Berry, K. Chatziioannou, and A. Zimmerman for their feedback on this work. The RIT authors gratefully acknowledge the NSF for financial support from Grants No. PHY-1607520, No. PHY-1707946, No. ACI-1550436, No. AST-1516150, No. ACI-1516125, and No. PHY-1726215. This work used the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) [allocation TG-PHY060027N], which is supported by NSF Grant No. ACI-1548562. Computational resources were also provided by the NewHorizons and BlueSky Clusters at the Rochester Institute of Technology, which were supported by NSF Grants No. PHY-0722703, No. DMS-0820923, No. AST-1028087, and No. PHY-1229173. R. O. S. is supported by NSF Grants No. AST-1412449, No. PHY-1505629, and No. PHY-1607520. The GT authors gratefully acknowledge NSF support through Grants No. PHY-1505824, No. 1505524, and No. XSEDE TG-PHY120016. They also gratefully acknowledge support from the Cullen-Peck and Dunn Families. The SXS Collaboration authors gratefully acknowledge the Sherman Fairchild Foundation and NSF for financial support from Grants No. PHY-1307489, No. PHY-1606522, No. PHY-1606654, and No. AST-1333129. They also gratefully acknowledge support for this research at CITA from NSERC of Canada, the Ontario Early Researcher Awards Program, the Canada Research Chairs Program, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Calculations were done on the ORCA computer cluster, supported by NSF Grant No. PHY-1429873, the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, CSU Fullerton, the GPC supercomputer at the SciNet HPC Consortium [113]; 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 calculations were performed on the Briarée cluster at Sherbrooke University, managed by Calcul Québec and Compute Canada and with operation funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), Ministére de l'Économie, de l'Innovation et des Exportations du Quebec (MEIE), RMGA and the Fonds de recherche du Québec—Nature et Technologies (FRQ-NT).

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Published - PhysRevD.97.064027.pdf

Submitted - 1712.05836.pdf

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PhysRevD.97.064027.pdf

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