Binary black hole spectroscopy

Abstract We study parameter estimation with post-Newtonian (PN) gravitational waveforms for the quasicircular, adiabatic inspiral of spinning binary compact objects. In particular, the performance of amplitude-corrected waveforms is compared with that of the more commonly used restricted waveforms, in Advanced LIGO and EGO. With restricted waveforms, the properties of the source can only be extracted from the phasing. In the case of amplitude-corrected waveforms, the spectrum encodes a wealth of additional information, which leads to dramatic improvements in parameter estimation. At distances of ∼ 100 Mpc, the full PN waveforms allow for high-accuracy parameter extraction for total mass up to several hundred solar masses, while with the restricted ones the errors are steep functions of mass, and accurate parameter estimation is only possible for relatively light stellar mass binaries. At the low-mass end, the inclusion of amplitude corrections reduces the error on the time of coalescence by an order of magnitude in Advanced LIGO and a factor of 5 in EGO compared to the restricted waveforms; at higher masses these differences are much larger. The individual component masses, which are very poorly determined with restricted waveforms, become measurable with high accuracy if amplitude-corrected waveforms are used, with errors as low as a few percent in Advanced LIGO and a few tenths of a percent in EGO. The usual spin-orbit parameter β is also poorly determined with restricted waveforms (except for low-mass systems in EGO), but the full waveforms give errors that are small compared to the largest possible value consistent with the Kerr bound. This suggests a way of finding out if one or both of the component objects violate this bound. On the other hand, we find that the spin-spin parameter σ remains poorly determined even when the full waveform is used. Generally, all errors have but a weak dependence on the magnitudes and orientations of the spins. We also briefly discuss the effect of amplitude corrections on parameter estimation in Initial LIGO.