2006/12/31 by John G. Baker, Sean T. McWilliams, James R. van Meter +5 · 10 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Seismic Waves and Analysis #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.75.124024
published as Phys.Rev.D75:124024,2007 · 17 pages, 20 figures. Final published version
openalex publication_date 2007/06/28 · arxiv created 2007/09/08 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Coalescing binary black hole mergers are expected to be the strongest gravitational wave sources for ground-based interferometers, such as the LIGO, VIRGO, and GEO600, as well as the space-based interferometer LISA. Until recently it has been impossible to reliably derive the predictions of general relativity for the final merger stage, which takes place in the strong-field regime. Recent progress in numerical relativity simulations is, however, revolutionizing our understanding of these systems. We examine here the specific case of merging equal-mass Schwarzschild black holes in detail, presenting new simulations in which the black holes start in the late-inspiral stage on orbits with very low eccentricity and evolve for \ensuremath∼1200M through \ensuremath∼7 orbits before merging. We study the accuracy and consistency of our simulations and the resulting gravitational waveforms, which encompass \ensuremath∼14 cycle before merger, and highlight the importance of using frequency (rather than time) to set the physical reference when comparing models. Matching our results to post-Newtonian (PN) calculations for the earlier parts of the inspiral provides a combined waveform with less than one cycle of accumulated phase error through the entire coalescence. Using this waveform, we calculate signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) for iLIGO, adLIGO, and LISA, highlighting the contributions from the late-inspiral and merger-ringdown parts of the waveform, which can now be simulated numerically. Contour plots of SNR as a function of z and M show that adLIGO can achieve SNR\ensuremath\gtrsim10 for some intermediate mass binary black holes (IMBBHs) out to z\ensuremath∼1, and that LISA can see massive binary black holes (MBBHs) in the range 3\ifmmode×\else\texttimes\fi104\ensuremath\lesssimM/M_\ensuremath\bigodot\ensuremath\lesssim107 at SNR>100 out to the earliest epochs of structure formation at z>15.