Speaker
Description
With the upcoming third-generation gravitational-wave detectors comes the need to build complete, faithful, and fast waveform models for asymmetric-mass-ratio compact binaries. Most efforts within the self-force community have focused on modeling these binaries’ inspiral regime, but for ground-based detectors the final merger can represent the dominant part of the signal. In the multiscale self-force expansion, binaries undergo three distinct dynamical phases: inspiral, transition-to-plunge, and plunge. Previous work on non-spinning quasicircular binaries has established waveform models at first post-adiabatic order (1PA) for the inspiral, second post-leading-transition order (2PLT) for the transition, and leading geodesic order (0PG) for the plunge. In this work, I present the first multiscale self-force inspiral-merger-ringdown (IMR) waveform model built from first-principles, as well as its implementation in the FastEMRIWaveforms (FEW) Python package. This self-force IMR waveform model consistently assembles the inspiral, transition and plunge trajectory and amplitudes into a single composite solution built from matched asymptotic expansions. The matching is performed directly at the level of the fluxes, the binding energy and the waveform amplitudes, allowing for a resummation of the entire IMR trajectory in terms of a flux-balance law. This work is a crucial milestone towards building fast and accurate waveform models for asymmetric-mass-ratio compact binaries.