Frequency-domain gravitational waves from non-precessing black-hole binaries. II. A phenomenological model for the advanced detector era

Abstract

We present a new frequency-domain phenomenological model of the gravitational-wave signal from the inspiral, merger and ringdown of non-precessing (aligned-spin) black-hole binaries. The model is calibrated to 19 hybrid effective-one-body--numerical-relativity waveforms up to mass ratios of 1:18 and black-hole spins of $|a/m| \sim 0.85$ ($0.98$ for equal-mass systems). The inspiral part of the model consists of an extension of frequency-domain post-Newtonian expressions, using higher-order terms fit to the hybrids. The merger-ringdown is based on a phenomenological ansatz that has been significantly improved over previous models. The model exhibits mismatches of typically less than 1\% against all 19 calibration hybrids, and an additional 29 verification hybrids, which provide strong evidence that, over the calibration region, the model is sufficiently accurate for all relevant gravitational-wave astronomy applications with the Advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors. Beyond the calibration region the model produces physically reasonable results, although we recommend caution in assuming that \emph{any} merger-ringdown waveform model is accurate outside its calibration region. As an example, we note that an alternative non-precessing model, SEOBNRv2 (calibrated up to spins of only 0.5 for unequal-mass systems), exhibits mismatch errors of up to 10\% for high spins outside its calibration region. We conclude that waveform models would benefit most from a larger number of numerical-relativity simulations of high-aligned-spin unequal-mass binaries.