Numerical Relativity Simulations of Compact Binary Coalescence in support of NCSA’s LIGO commitment

Eliu Huerta Escudero, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

Roland Haas, Eliu Huerta Escudero, Daniel George, A. Miguel Holgado, Daniel Johnson, Derek Glennon, Hongyu Shen, Adam Rebei, Shawn Rosofsky, Rui Lan, Jiaxi Nie, Dongwei Shi, Anushri Gupta

The Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (aLIGO) detectors inaugurated the field of gravitational wave (GW) astrophysics with two significant detections of binary black hole (BBH) mergers in aLIGO's first GW discovery campaign.

aLIGO's second GW discovery campaign started on November 30, 2016 and came to an end on August 25, 2017. During this campaign, LIGO reported the detection of a new GW transient, originated by a massive BBH merger. On August 1, 2017 the European Advanced Virgo detector joined aLIGO, initiating the first intercontinental, three-detector, coincident GW search in the advanced GW detector era. Preliminary analyses have identified several GW candidates, whose significance the LIGO team is currently quantifying to confirm them as GW sources.

An integral part of this analysis requires the validation of these GW candidates, and detailed investigations to determine their astrophysical origin. These studies aim to determine whether these sources can be accurately described with Einstein's theory of general relativity and, once this is confirmed, whether their astrophysical properties are consistent with BBH mergers, binary neutron star mergers or neutron star-black hole mergers. In order to establish this association and to determine the parameters, e.g. masses and spins, of the sources, we require the best description of these astrophysical events, which is currently obtained with numerical relativity (NR) simulations of Einstein's field equation.

The NCSA Gravity Group is an official member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC). Our commitment with LIGO includes the construction of NR catalogs that are used for in designing analytical waveform (WF) template, validation of GW candidates, and the creation of scientific visualizations for outreach purposes. NR represents a key area in our multidisciplinary research program. Software development to facilitate large scale NR campaigns in high performance computing environments has been a central theme of our activities as members of the Einstein Toolkit Consortium. We use our NR catalogs to develop from the ground up, calibrate and validate state-of-the-art WF models that we implement in LIGO's Algorithm Library to search for GW sources. These NR catalogs will be shared with the scientific community through the NCSA's NSF funded DataVault project. The projects we will target with this proposal will enable our team to maintain a leading profile in the astrophysics and NR communities, and meet our commitments with the LSC.