2016/06/30 by Katerina Chatziioannou, Antoine Klein, Neil J. Cornish +3 · 5 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Angular momentum #Astrophysics #Binary number #Classical mechanics #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #Geophysics and Sensor Technology #Gravitation #Gravitational wave #Orbital motion #Physics #Precession #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Quantum mechanics #Spins #Waveform #astro-ph.HE #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.118.051101
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 051101 (2017) · 5 pages, 3 figures, final published version
openalex publication_date 2017/01/31 · arxiv created 2017/02/07 · arxiv updated 2017/02/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Binary systems of two compact objects circularize and spiral toward each other via the emission of gravitational waves. The coupling of the spins of each object with the orbital angular momentum causes the orbital plane to precess, which leads to modulation of the gravitational wave signal. Until now, generating frequency-domain waveforms for fully precessing systems for use in gravitational wave data analysis meant numerically integrating the equations of motion, then Fourier transforming the result, which is very computationally intensive for systems that complete hundreds or thousands of cycles in the sensitive band of a detector. Previously, analytic solutions were only available for certain special cases or for simplified models. Here we describe the construction of closed-form, frequency-domain waveforms for fully precessing, quasicircular binary inspirals.