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

QUIROGA, G. D.; LIGO SCIENTIFIC COLLABORATION

CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM GRAVITY

IOP PUBLISHING LTD

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2014 vol. 31

0264-9381

The Numerical INJection Analysis (NINJA) project is a collaborative effortbetween members of the numerical relativity and gravitational-wave (GW)astrophysics communities. The purpose of NINJA is to study the ability todetect GWs emitted from merging binary black holes (BBH) and recover theirparameters with next-generation GW observatories. We report here on theresults of the second NINJA project, NINJA-2, which employs 60 completeBBH hybrid waveforms consisting of a numerical portion modelling the lateinspiral, merger, and ringdown stitched to a post-Newtonian portion modellingthe early inspiral. In a ?blind injection challenge? similar to that conductedin recent Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) andVirgo science runs, we added seven hybrid waveforms to two months of datarecoloured to predictions of Advanced LIGO (aLIGO) and Advanced Virgo(AdV) sensitivity curves during their first observing runs. The resulting datawasanalysed by GW detection algorithms and 6 of the waveforms were recoveredwith false alarm rates smaller than 1 in a thousand years. Parameter-estimationalgorithms were run on each of these waveforms to explore the ability toconstrain the masses, component angular momenta and sky position of thesewaveforms. We find that the strong degeneracy between the mass ratio andthe BHs? angular momenta will make it difficult to precisely estimate theseparameters with aLIGO and AdV. We also perform a large-scale Monte Carlostudy to assess the ability to recover each of the 60 hybrid waveforms withearly aLIGO and AdV sensitivity curves. Our results predict that early aLIGOand AdV will have a volume-weighted average sensitive distance of 300 Mpc(1 Gpc) for 10M+10M (50M+50M)BBHcoalescences.We demonstratethat neglecting the component angular momenta in the waveform models usedin matched-filtering will result in a reduction in sensitivity for systems withlarge component angular momenta. This reduction is estimated to be up to∼15% for 50M + 50M BBH coalescences with almost maximal angularmomenta aligned with the orbit when using early aLIGO and AdV sensitivitycurves.