Parameter estimation for the GWTC-4.0 catalog with phenomenological waveform models that include orbital eccentricity and an updated description of spin precession
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology2025-12-23v1Cosmology and Nongalactic AstrophysicsHigh Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
The GWTC-4.0 catalog of transient gravitational wave signals describes observations made in the first part of the fourth observing run of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) gravitational wave detector network. Here we extend the LVK's GWTC-4.0 analysis to elliptic orbits, and an improved description of spin precession in the frequency domain. For this study we use state-of-the-art waveforms from the IMRPhenom family (specifically XPNR, TPHM, and TEHM), and we consider the 84 confidently detected events that are consistent with binary-black-hole mergers. We present an extended catalog of updated posterior samples, quantify how incorporation of these waveform effects alters inferred source properties relative to previous analyses, and discuss waveform systematics.
@article{arxiv.2512.19513,
title = {Parameter estimation for the GWTC-4.0 catalog with phenomenological waveform models that include orbital eccentricity and an updated description of spin precession},
author = {Yumeng Xu and Jorge Valencia and Héctor Estellés Estrella and Antoni Ramos Buades and Sascha Husa and Maria Rosselló-Sastre and Joan Llobera Querol and Felip Ramis Vidal and Maria de Lluc Planas Llompart and Marta Colleoni and Eleanor Hamilton and Arnau Montava Agudo and Jesús Yébana Carrilero and Anna Heffernan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.19513},
year = {2025}
}