van de Meent Maarten, Pfeiffer Harald P
Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute), Am Mühlenberg 1, D-14476 Potsdam, Germany.
Phys Rev Lett. 2020 Oct 30;125(18):181101. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.181101.
The inspiral phasing of binary black holes at intermediate mass ratios (m_{2}/m_{1}∼10^{-3}) is important for gravitational wave observations, but not accessible to standard modeling techniques: The accuracy of the small mass-ratio (SMR) expansion is unknown at intermediate mass ratios, whereas numerical relativity simulations cannot reach this regime. This article assesses the accuracy of the SMR expansion by extracting the first three terms of the SMR expansion from numerical relativity data for nonspinning, quasicircular binaries. We recover the leading term predicted by SMR theory and obtain a robust prediction of the next-to-leading term. The influence of higher-order terms is bounded to be small, indicating that the SMR series truncated at next-to-leading order is quite accurate at intermediate mass ratios and even at nearly comparable mass binaries. We estimate the range of applicability for SMR and post-Newtonian series for nonspinning, quasicircular inspirals.
中等质量比（(m_{2}/m_{1}∼10^{-3})）的双黑洞旋进相位对于引力波观测很重要，但标准建模技术无法处理：在中等质量比下，小质量比（SMR）展开的精度未知，而数值相对论模拟无法达到这一范围。本文通过从非自旋、准圆形双黑洞的数值相对论数据中提取SMR展开的前三项来评估SMR展开的精度。我们恢复了SMR理论预测的主导项，并对次主导项进行了可靠预测。高阶项的影响被限制为很小，这表明在次主导阶截断的SMR级数在中等质量比甚至在质量几乎相当的双黑洞情况下都相当准确。我们估计了非自旋、准圆形旋进的SMR和后牛顿级数的适用范围。
