Parameter estimation with a spinning multimode waveform model

Gravitational waves from compact binary coalescence sources can be decomposed into spherical-harmonic multipoles, the dominant being the quadrupole ( ( l , | m | ) = ( 2 , 2 ) ) modes. The contribution of subdominant modes toward total signal power increases with increasing binary mass ratio and source inclination to the detector. It is well known that in these cases neglecting higher modes could lead to measurement biases, but these have not yet been quantified with a higher-mode model that includes spin effects. In this study, we use the multimode aligned-spin phenomenological waveform model imrphenomhm [1] to investigate the effects of including multimode content in estimating source parameters and contrast the results with using a quadrupole-only model (imrphenomd). We use as sources imrphenomhm and hybrid effective-one-body–numerical-relativity waveforms with zero spin over a range of mass-ratio and inclination combinations, and recover the parameters with imrphenomhm and imrphenomd. These allow us to quantify the accuracy of parameter measurements using a multimode model, the biases incurred when using a quadrupole-only model to recover full (multimode) signals, and the systematic errors in the imrphenomhm model. We see that the parameters recovered by multimode templates are more precise for all nonzero inclinations as compared to quadrupole templates. For multimode injections, imrphenomd recovers biased parameters for nonzero inclinations with lower likelihood while imrphenomhm-recovered parameters are accurate for most cases, and if a bias exists, it can be explained as a combined effect of observational priors and (in the case of hybrid-NR signals) waveform inaccuracies. However, for cases where imrphenomhm recovers biased parameters, the bias is always significantly smaller than the corresponding imrphenomd recovery, and we conclude that imrphenomhm will be sufficiently accurate to allow unbiased measurements for most gravitational wave observations.