In response to LIGO's observation of GW170104, we performed a series of full numerical simulations of binary black holes, each designed to replicate likely realizations of its dynamics and radiation. These simulations have been performed at multiple resolutions and with two independent techniques to solve Einstein's equations. For the nonprecessing and precessing simulations, we demonstrate the two techniques agree mode by mode, at a precision substantially in excess of statistical uncertainties in current LIGO's observations. Conversely, we demonstrate our full numerical solutions contain information which is not accurately captured with the approximate phenomenological models commonly used to infer compact binary parameters. To quantify the impact of these differences on parameter inference for GW170104 specifically, we compare the predictions of our simulations and these approximate models to LIGO's observations of GW170104.
@article{arxiv.1712.05836,
title = {Targeted numerical simulations of binary black holes for GW170104},
author = {James Healy and Jacob Lange and Richard O'Shaughnessy and Carlos Lousto and Manuela Campanelli and Andrew Williamson and Yosef Zlochower and Juan Calderon Bustillo and James Clark and Christopher Evans and D. Ferguson and Sudarshan Ghonge and Karan Jani and Bhavesh Khamesra and Pablo Laguna and Deirdre M. Shoemaker and Alyssa Garcia and Michael Boyle and Daniel Hemberger and Lawrence Kidder and Prayush Kumar and Geoffrey Lovelace and Harald Pfeiffer and Mark Scheel and Saul Teukolsky},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.05836},
year = {2018}
}