References#

This code is built upon the self-force formalism, which aims to describe the dynamics and gravitational wave radiation of black hole binaries using perturbation theory. Here we give a brief list of relevant references and citations in the self-force literature that were useful and/or necessary for building bhpwave. A comprehensive review of black hole perturbation theory and the self-force formalism is provided in (Pound and Wardell; 2021) along with explicit derivations for adiabatic inspirals and waveforms. For some of the first numerical studies of quasi-circular inspirals in Kerr spacetime, see (Detweiler; 1978), (Kennefick; 1998), and (Hughes; 2000). For recent studies, see (Taracchini, et al.; 2014) and (Gralla, Hughes, and Warburton; 2016). For numerical calculations of both multi-periodic waveform harmonics for both snapshot and adiabatic inspirals, see (Drasco and Hughes; 2006) and (Hughes, et al.; 2021). Recent open-source codes that implement these methods are discussed further in the External Waveform Codes section below.

Citations#

External Waveform Codes#

For general reference, we include other open-source tools that rely on black hole perturbation theory to generate gravitational waveforms. These tools serve as great sources for comparison with bhpwave.

  • kerrgeodesic_gw: A SageMath package, called kerrgeodesic_gw, that creates “snapshot” waveforms (see (Drasco and Hughes; 2006) for more details) for small bodies on circular geodesics around Kerr black holes. The waveforms are similar to those produced in bhpwave, except they do not include backreaction so the inspiral of the small body is not modeled. This code is based on the work (Gourgoulhon, et al.; 2019) and the references therein.

  • FastEMRIWaveforms: A Python package, called few, that creates adiabatic waveforms for small bodies undergoing eccentric, equatorial inspirals around Schwarzschild massive black holes (MBHs). Therefore, bhpwave and few overlap when the Kerr spin paramter \(a=0\) in bhpwave and when the orbital eccentricity \(e_0 = 0.\) in few. This code is based on the work (Chua, et al.; 2020) and (Katz, et al.; 2021) and the references therein.