The One-Armed Spiral Instability in Neutron Star Mergers and its Detectability in Gravitational Waves

We distribute complete gravitational-wave signals in the Advanced LIGO band (10 Hz - 8192 Hz) of the inspiral and merger of two neutron stars. These waveforms been constructed by hybridizing numerical-relativity data obtained with the WhiskyTHC code [1] with tidal effective-one-body waveforms [2,3]. More details on the procedure used to generate these waveforms are given in [4].  

The waveforms are distributed as HDF5 files containing the amplitude and phase of the -2 spin-weighted spherical harmonics multipoles of the strain:

\(( h_+ - \mathrm{i} h_\times )_{l,m} = \frac{A_{l,m}}{D_{\rm cm}} \exp(-\mathrm{i} \phi_{l,m} )\)

where \(D_{\rm cm}\) is the distance in cm from the source.

The data files include a machine readable "/metadata" group with:

• /metadata/EOS: name of the equation of state
• /metadata/M_{A|B}: mass in isolation of star A (or B) in grams
• /metadata/R_{A|B}: radius of star A (or B) in cm
• /metadata/k2T: tidal coupling constant of the binary (see [3])
• /metadata/kl_{A|B}: l=2,3,4 dimensionless Love numbers of star A (or B)

We store amplitude and phase for multipoles modes up to l=4 as time series sampled at 16384 Hz.

We make these waveforms freely available in the hope that they will be useful.  We kindly ask you to cite [3] and [4] in any publication resulting from the use of these waveforms.

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[1] http://www.tapir.caltech.edu/~david_e/whiskythc.html
[2] https://eob.ihes.fr/
[3] S. Bernuzzi, A. Nagar, T. Dietrich, T. Damour; Modeling the Dynamics of Tidally Interacting Binary Neutron Stars up to the Merger; Phys.Rev.Lett. 114 (2015) 16, 161103.
[4] D. Radice, S. Bernuzzi, C. D. Ott; The One-Armed Spiral Instability in Neutron Star Mergers and its Detectability in Gravitational Waves; arXiv:1603.05726.