Numerical-relativity validation of effective-one-body waveforms in the intermediate-mass-ratio regime

Understand

One of the open problems in developing binary black hole (BBH) waveforms for gravitational wave astronomy is to model the intermediate mass ratio regime and connect it to the extreme mass ratio regime.

• A natural approach is to employ the effective one body (EOB) approach to the two-body dynamics that, by design, can cover the entire mass ratio range and naturally incorporates the extreme mass ratio limit.
• Here we use recently obtained numerical relativity (NR) data with mass ratios $m_1/m_2=(7,15,\,32,\,64,\,128)$ to test the accuracy of the state-of-the-art EOB model TEOBResumS in the intermediate mass ratio regime.
• We generally find an excellent EOB/NR consistency around merger and ringdown for all mass ratios and for all available subdominant multipoles, except for the $\ell=m=5$ one.