Inspiral-merger-ringdown waveforms of spinning, precessing black-hole binaries in the effective-one-body formalism

Abstract

We describe a general procedure to generate spinning, precessing waveforms that include inspiral, merger, and ringdown stages in the effective-one-body (EOB) approach. The procedure uses a precessing frame in which precession-induced amplitude and phase modulations are minimized, and an inertial frame, aligned with the spin of the final black hole, in which we carry out the matching of the inspiral-plunge to merger-ringdown waveforms. As a first application, we build spinning, precessing EOB waveforms for the gravitational modes $\ensuremath{\ell}=2$ such that in the nonprecessing limit those waveforms agree with the EOB waveforms recently calibrated to numerical-relativity waveforms. Without recalibrating the EOB model, we then compare EOB and post-Newtonian precessing waveforms to two numerical-relativity waveforms produced by the Caltech-Cornell-CITA collaboration. The numerical waveforms are strongly precessing and have 35 and 65 gravitational-wave cycles. We find a remarkable agreement between EOB and numerical-relativity precessing waveforms and spins' evolutions. The phase difference is $\ensuremath{\sim}0.2\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{rad}$ rad at merger, while the mismatches, computed using the advanced-LIGO noise spectral density, are below 2% when maximizing only on the time and phase at coalescence and on the polarization angle.