Including mode mixing in a higher-multipole model for gravitational waveforms from nonspinning black-hole binaries

Abstract

As gravitational-wave (GW) observations of binary black holes are becoming a precision tool for physics and astronomy, several subdominant effects in the GW signals need to be accurately modeled. Previous studies have shown that neglecting subdominant modes in the GW templates causes an unacceptable loss in detection efficiency and large systematic errors in the estimated parameters for binaries with large mass ratios. Our recent work constructed a phenomenological gravitational waveform family for nonspinning black-hole binaries that includes subdominant spherical harmonic modes (l =2,m=±1), (l=3, m=±3), and (l=4, m=±4) in addition to the dominant quadrupole mode, (l=2, m=±2). In this article, we construct analytical models for the (l=3, m=±2) and (l=4, m=±3) modes and include them in the existing waveform family. Accurate modeling of these modes is complicated by the mixing of multiple spheroidal harmonic modes. We develop a method for accurately modeling the effect of mode mixing, thus producing an analytical waveform family that has faithfulness greater than 99.6%.