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    Analysis of GWTC-3 with fully precessing numerical relativity surrogate models

    Tousif Islam1,2,*, Avi Vajpeyi3,4,†, Feroz H. Shaik1,2, Carl-Johan Haster5,6,7,8, Vijay Varma1,2,9, Scott E. Field1,2, Jacob Lange10,11, Richard O’Shaughnessy10, and Rory Smith12,4

    • *Contact author: tousifislam@ucsb.edu
    • †Contact author: avi.vajpeyi@auckland.ac.nz

    Phys. Rev. D 112, 044001 – Published 1 August, 2025

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/48ck-2fff

    Abstract

    The third Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog contains 90 binary coalescence candidates detected by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration (LVK). We provide a reanalysis of binary black hole (BBH) events using a numerical relativity waveform surrogate model, NRSur7dq4, that includes all ℓ≤4 spin-weighted spherical harmonic modes as well as the complete physical effects of precession. Properties of the remnant black holes’ mass, spin vector, and kick vector are found using an associated remnant surrogate model NRSur7dq4Remnant. Both NRSur7dq4 and NRSur7dq4Remnant models have errors comparable to numerical relativity simulations and allow for high-accuracy parameter estimates. We restrict our analysis to 47 BBH events that fall within the regime of validity of NRSur7dq4 (mass ratios greater than 1/6 and total masses greater than 60M⊙). While for most of these events, our results match the LVK analyses that were obtained using the semianalytical models such as IMRPhenomXPHM and SEOBNRv4PHM, we find that for more than 20% of events, the NRSur7dq4 model recovers noticeably different measurements of black hole properties like the masses and spins, as well as extrinsic properties like the binary inclination and distance. For instance, GW150914_095045 exhibits noticeable differences in spin precession and spin magnitude measurements. Other notable findings include one event (GW191109_010717) that constrains the effective spin χeff to be negative at a 99.3% credible level and two events (GW191109_010717 and GW200129_065458) with well-constrained kick velocities. Furthermore, compared to the models used in the LVK analyses, NRSur7dq4 recovers a larger signal-to-noise ratio and/or Bayes factors for several events. While these findings have important astrophysical implications, some of the more interesting events are affected by transient detector noise, which can be challenging to remove from short-duration signals.

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