A Survey of Four Precessing Waveform Models for Binary Black Hole Systems

Understand

Angular momentum and spin precession are expected to be generic features of a significant fraction of binary black hole systems.

• As such, it is essential to have waveform models that faithfully incorporate the effects of precession.
• Here, we assess how well the current state of the art models achieve this for waveform strains constructed only from the $\ell=2$ multipoles.Specifically, we conduct a survey on the faithfulness of the waveform models %(approximants) \texttt{SEOBNRv5PHM}, \texttt{TEOBResumS}, \texttt{IMRPhenomTPHM}, \texttt{IMRPhenomXPHM} to the numerical relativity (NR) surrogate \texttt{NRSur7dq4} and to NR waveforms from the \texttt{SXS} catalog.
• The former assessment involves systems with mass ratios up to six and dimensionless spins up to 0.8.