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Hybridization of second-order gravitational self-force and numerical relativity waveforms for quasicircular and nonspinning black hole binaries

H. L. Iglesias*, L. Durkan, and D. M. Shoemaker

  • *Contact author: higlesia@utexas.edu
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Phys. Rev. D 114, 044070 – Published 21 August, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/26wy-s7tf

Abstract

In the past few decades, the waveform community has made advances in producing waveforms that span the inspiral-merger-ringdown of comparable-mass-ratio black hole binaries using advances in post-Newtonian and numerical relativity (NR) theory along with state-of-the-art gravitational wave models. Current methods in NR have shown progress toward producing stable simulations reaching mass ratios of 1∶100; however, the computational cost becomes prohibitively expensive as the mass ratio and the length of the simulation increases. Meanwhile, the gravitational self-force (GSF) community has developed waveform models that not only generate extreme mass ratio inspiral waveforms, but also generate near-equal-mass-ratio waveforms with high fidelity. To assess the limits of both the GSF and NR waveforms and alleviate the computational costs of NR, we present hybridized GSF-NR waveforms for nonspinning binary black hole systems in which GSF provides the inspiral, and NR the merger and ringdown. The hybrid waveforms are generated from a set of 68 nonspinning NR waveforms from the SXS catalog with mass ratios spanning 1∶1 to 1∶20 and include the (2, 2), (2, 1), (3, 3), (3, 2), (4, 4), (4, 3), and (5, 5) spin-weighted spherical harmonic modes. In this paper, we will highlight a selection of these hybrid waveforms and examine the error in the hybridization procedure. We will investigate the impact of subdominant modes on the accuracy of the hybrid waveforms by performing mismatch comparisons with surrogate models. To address the feasibility of hybridizing GSF inspirals with short-duration, high-mass ratio NR waveforms, thereby alleviating computational costs, we will discuss the relationship between mass ratio and the placement of the matching window, which can be used to predict the necessary and optimal number of NR cycles that contribute to the hybrid waveform.

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 044070– Published 21 August, 2026
  • Received 14 October 2025
  • Accepted 7 July 2026
Article part of CHORUS
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