Analysis of GWTC-3 with fully precessing numerical relativity surrogate models

Abstract

The third Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog (GWTC-3) contains 90 binary coalescence candidates detected by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration (LVK). We provide a re-analysis of binary black hole (BBH) events using a recently developed numerical relativity (NR) waveform surrogate model, NRSur7dq4, that includes all $\ell \leq 4$ spin-weighted spherical harmonic modes as well as the complete physical effects of precession. Properties of the remnant black holes' (BH's) mass, spin vector, and kick vector are found using an associated remnant surrogate model NRSur7dq4Remnant. Both NRSur7dq4 and NRSur7dq4Remnant models have errors comparable to numerical relativity simulations and allow for high-accuracy parameter estimates. We restrict our analysis to 47 BBH events that fall within the regime of validity of NRSur7dq4 (mass ratios greater than 1/6 and total masses greater than $60 M_{\odot}$). While for most of these events our results match the LVK analyses that were obtained using the semi-analytical models such as IMRPhenomXPHM and SEOBNRv4PHM, we find that for more than 20\% of events the NRSur7dq4 model recovers noticeably different measurements of black hole properties like the masses and spins, as well as extrinsic properties like the binary inclination and distance. For instance, GW150914_095045 exhibits noticeable differences in spin precession and spin magnitude measurements. Other notable findings include one event (GW191109_010717) that constrains the effective spin $\chi_{eff}$ to be negative at a 99.3\% credible level and two events (GW191109_010717 and GW200129_065458) with well-constrained kick velocities. Furthermore, compared to the models used in the LVK analyses, NRSur7dq4 recovers a larger signal-to-noise ratio and/or Bayes factors for several events.