Comparison of Post-Newtonian and Numerical Evolutions of Black-Hole Binaries
Published in Proceedings of 18th Workshop on General Relativity and Gravitation in Japan (JGRG18), 17-21
(Friday, January 23, 2009)
Abstract
In this paper, we compare the waveforms from the post-Newtonian (PN) approach with the numerical simulations of generic black-hole binaries which have mass ratio q∼0.8, arbitrarily oriented spins with magnitudes S1/m21∼0.6 and S2/m22∼0.4, and orbit 9 times from an initial orbital separation of r≈11M prior to merger. We observe a reasonably good agreement between the PN and numerical waveforms, with an overlap of over 98% for the first six cycles of the (ℓ=2,m=±2) mode and over 90% for the (ℓ=2,m=1) and (ℓ=3,m=3) modes.
