Estimating effective higher order terms in the post-Newtonian binding energy and gravitational-wave flux: Nonspinning compact binary inspiral

Abstract

In the adiabatic post-Newtonian (PN) approximation, the phase evolution of gravitational waves (GWs) from inspiraling compact binaries in quasicircular orbits is computed by equating the change in binding energy with the GW flux. This energy balance equation can be solved in different ways, which result in multiple approximants of the PN waveforms. Due to the poor convergence of the PN expansion, these approximants tend to differ from each other during the late inspiral. Which of these approximants should be chosen as templates for detection and parameter estimation of GWs from inspiraling compact binaries is not obvious. In this paper, we present estimates of the effective higher-order (beyond the currently available 4 and 3.5PN) nonspinning terms in the PN expansion of the binding energy and the GW flux that minimize the difference of multiple PN approximants (TaylorT1, TaylorT2, TaylorT4, TaylorF2) with effective one-body waveforms calibrated to numerical relativity (EOBNR). We show that PN approximants constructed using the effective higher-order terms show significantly better agreement (as compared to 3.5PN) with the inspiral part of the EOBNR. For nonspinning binaries with component masses m_1,2 ∈ [1.4 M⊙ 15 M⊙], most of the approximants have a match (faithfulness) of better than 99% with both EOBNR and each other.