Catalog of precessing black-hole-binary numerical-relativity simulations

Abstract

We present a public catalog of numerical-relativity binary-black-hole simulations. The catalog contains datasets from 80 distinct configurations of precessing binary-black-hole systems, with mass ratios up to <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><a:msub><a:mi>m</a:mi><a:mn>2</a:mn></a:msub><a:mo>/</a:mo><a:msub><a:mi>m</a:mi><a:mn>1</a:mn></a:msub><a:mo>=</a:mo><a:mn>8</a:mn></a:math>, dimensionless spin magnitudes on the larger black hole up to <c:math xmlns:c="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><c:mo stretchy="false">|</c:mo><c:msub><c:mover accent="true"><c:mi>S</c:mi><c:mo stretchy="false">→</c:mo></c:mover><c:mn>2</c:mn></c:msub><c:mo stretchy="false">|</c:mo><c:mo>/</c:mo><c:msubsup><c:mi>m</c:mi><c:mn>2</c:mn><c:mn>2</c:mn></c:msubsup><c:mo>=</c:mo><c:mn>0.8</c:mn></c:math> (the small black hole is nonspinning), and a range of five values of spin misalignment for each mass-ratio/spin combination. We discuss the physical properties of the configurations in our catalog, and assess the accuracy of the initial configuration of each simulation and of the gravitational waveforms. We perform a careful analysis of the errors due to the finite resolution of our simulations and the finite distance from the source at which we extract the waveform data and provide a conservative estimate of the mismatch accuracy. We find that the upper limit on the mismatch uncertainty of our waveforms (including multipoles <i:math xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><i:mo>ℓ</i:mo><i:mo>≤</i:mo><i:mn>5</i:mn></i:math>) is 0.4%. In doing this we present a consistent approach to combining mismatch uncertainties from multiple error sources. We compare this release to previous catalogs and discuss how these new simulations complement the existing public datasets. In particular, this is the first catalog to uniformly cover this parameter space of single-spin binaries and there was previously only sparse coverage of the precessing-binary parameter space for mass ratios <k:math xmlns:k="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><k:mo>≳</k:mo><k:mn>5</k:mn></k:math>. We discuss applications of these new data, and the most urgent directions for future simulation work. Published by the American Physical Society 2024