Minutes 5th LISA PE telecon 17.01.2008 ================================================ Partial list of participants: Curt Cutler Alicia M Sintes sintes#aei.mpg.de B.S.Sathyaprakash Chris van den Broeck Han Wang Emanuele Berti Miquel Trias Neil Cornish Jonathan Gair Steve Drasco Ed Porter ========================================================= 0- Ed let us know that he is not included in the mailing list. Alicia apologies and will take care he receives all future messages. ========================================================= 1-SMBH status of the various check and comparisons: - Trias-Sintes have made corrections into the definition of phi_c to match those of Neil's et al they have posted the results (Fisher matrices, errors). They also provided waveforms in time and frequency domain. Neil notices that there is a good agreement in the frequency domain with the waveforms he posted, but in the time domain the envelope matches but clearly not the frequency. Since TS waveforms were produced at the last minute, TS will check and report (Actually a mistake has been found in the wave the time-domain waveforms were produced and the wiki is now updated. Fisher matrices were not affected by this mistake). - Trias also provided the SNR for the restricted PN case as requested by AISSV for the mbh1a and mbh2a test cases and compare with their results (single detectors and two detector cases). He also provided a full Mathematica notebook that only computes SNR for this RPN case. This is a simplified version of his C/Fortran code and much easier to understand. Trias and Sintes invite other groups to look into it, identify errors if any, or misinterpretations of conventions. Actions Items: -Cardiff group will check the Mathematica notebook and look for differences with their code -Ed Porter will also look into it, and check is the conventions are ok and follow the MLDC ones - Miquel will check the waveforms - others invited to have a look as well Cutler also asks if AISSV could provide waveforms Neils tells us that Neil+Scott's code in the MLDC architecture (includes waveforms with spins) matches those results from Stas at 100% level ========================================================= 2. EMRI waveforms Jonathan not online, Ed reporting: they tried to repeat Neil's results for EMRIs but did not go so well. They have two codes - one uses normalized waveforms and computes the best-fit distance from the recovered SNR MCMC approach. This is the code has been well tested. While the second code has been recently written as a finisher and uses un-normalized waveforms and they are still debugging it. The codes are in terms of the plunge parameters which are not the best, while Neil's uses the initial parameters. Jonathan & Ed also use an approximate waveform model, which is based on Barack and Cutler but with some simplifications to speed up waveform computation. Jonathan is looking into convergence tests, since the Fisher code for some plunge parameters does not converge. Preliminary results were posted on the wiki for the training source 1.3.2 (MLDC) Neil suggests to supply Fisher matrices for comparison. It is also pointed out that Barack has a different version of the Fisher code, and that Neil's way to compute EMRIs is much faster than other codes. Action item: keep debugging the un-normalized waveform code and report in 2 weeks. ========================================================= 3. binary black hole population models Marta and Emanuele have posted a new document on the wiki on black hole spin evolution due to mergers and accretion and presented some preliminary results. This document describes the implications of numerical relativity results for black hole spin evolutions. Emanuele walked us through the document. They look into the results from NR from Buonanno, Kidder and Lehner arXiv:0709.3839 [astro-ph] and Rezzolla, et al, arXiv:0710.3345, arXiv:0712.3541 [gr-qc]. Marta and Emanuele studied the spin evolution of merging black holes in 3 different scenarios: - aligned case - equatorial inspirals - completely isotropic case It followed a discussion on the accretion disk. Action items: Write a short paper Post the data, i.e., produce the data sets for this taskforce ========================================================= Next telecon: Jan 31st 8:15 PST, 11:15 EST, 16:15 UTC, 17:15 CET Please send comments or correction to sintes (@) aei.mpg.de