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Authors: Thibault Damour, Alessandro Nagar, Mark Hannam, Sascha Husa, Bernd Brugmann

Date: 21 Mar 2008

Abstract: The Effective-One-Body (EOB) formalism contains several flexibility parameters, notably $a_5$, $\vp$ and $\a$. We show here how to jointly determine the values of these parameters by simultaneously best-fitting the EOB waveform to two, independent, numerical relativity (NR) simulations of inspiralling and/or coalescing binary black hole systems: published Caltech-Cornell {\it inspiral} data on one side and newly computed {\it coalescence} data on the other side. The resulting, essentially unique, ‘best-fit’ EOB waveform is then shown to exhibit excellent agreement with NR coalescence data for several mass ratios. The dephasing between EOB and published Caltech-Cornell inspiral data is found to be smaller than $\pm 2\times 10ˆ{-4}$ gravitational wave cycles over the entire span ($\sim 3000M$, corresponding to 30 cycles) of the inspiral simulation. The dephasings between EOB and the new coalescence data are found to be smaller than: (i) $\pm 4\times 10ˆ{-3}$ gravitational wave cycles over $730M$ (11 cycles), in the equal mass case, and (ii) $\pm 8\times 10ˆ{-3}$ gravitational wave cycles over about $900M$ (17 cycles) in the 2:1 mass-ratio case. These new results corroborate the aptitude of the EOB formalism to provide accurate representations of general relativistic waveforms, which areneeded by currently operating gravitational wave detectors.

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