A catalog of long, eccentric and precessing binary black hole simulations from ICTS-TIFR
Abstract
We present a catalogue of 31 binary black hole simulations performed with the Spectral Einstein Code (SpEC) on the Sonic cluster at ICTS-TIFR, Bengaluru between August 2023 and December 2024, targeting the sparsely covered corner of parameter space in which orbital eccentricity and spin-orbit precession are present simultaneously: 17 configurations are both eccentric and precessing, spanning mass ratios 1 ≤ q ≤ 11 and initial eccentricities up to ê0 = 0.40. The longest, EccPrecDiff002, inspirals for 80 orbits (159 gravitational-wave cycles), to our knowledge the longest simultaneously eccentric and precessing binary black hole evolution to date. Compile-time optimisation of SpEC and its third-party library stack for the AMD Zen-2 architecture delivered a 90% speedup of the initial-data solver and a 40% speedup of the evolution, roughly half of the latter traceable to a single defect in how pre-2.34 glibc reported cache topology on AMD processors. The campaign consumed 1.18 × 106 CPU-hours. We document the post-processing pipeline and validate the frame transformation and waveforms. Eccentricity is measured from the waveforms and compared against the initial data. The first law of binary black hole mechanics, a test of approximate helical symmetry, is satisfied to better than 0.54% for every configuration with eω < 0.2, and we show that even precessing systems can be regarded as possessing approximate helical symmetry in the co-precessing frame. Using the aligned-spin simulations to calibrate the numerical floor, the co-precessing approximation's mirror-symmetry violation lies three to four ordersof magnitude above it, growing from 0.7% to 5.3%with opening angle. EccPrecDiff002 spans the band above 5 Hz without hybridisationfor M ≤ 62 M⊙, giving a single-interferometer signal-to-noise ratio of 961 in Cosmic Explorer at 1 Gpc.
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BibTeX
@misc{prasad2026catalog,
title = {{A catalog of long, eccentric and precessing binary black hole simulations from ICTS-TIFR}},
author = {Vaishak Prasad and Prayush Kumar and Michael Boyle and Lawrence E. Kidder and Harald P. Pfeiffer and Mark A. Scheel},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.19688},
eprint = {2610.19688},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19688},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - A catalog of long, eccentric and precessing binary black hole simulations from ICTS-TIFR
AU - Vaishak Prasad
AU - Prayush Kumar
AU - Michael Boyle
AU - Lawrence E. Kidder
AU - Harald P. Pfeiffer
AU - Mark A. Scheel
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/14
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.19688
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19688
AB - We present a catalogue of 31 binary black hole simulations performed with the Spectral Einstein Code (SpEC) on the Sonic cluster at ICTS-TIFR, Bengaluru between August 2023 and December 2024, targeting the sparsely covered corner of parameter space in which orbital eccentricity and spin-orbit precession are present simultaneously: 17 configurations are both eccentric and precessing, spanning mass ratios 1 ≤ q ≤ 11 and initial eccentricities up to ê_0 = 0.40. The longest, EccPrecDiff002, inspirals for 80 orbits (159 gravitational-wave cycles), to our knowledge the longest simultaneously eccentric and precessing binary black hole evolution to date. Compile-time optimisation of SpEC and its third-party library stack for the AMD Zen-2 architecture delivered a 90% speedup of the initial-data solver and a 40% speedup of the evolution, roughly half of the latter traceable to a single defect in how pre-2.34 glibc reported cache topology on AMD processors. The campaign consumed 1.18 × 10^6 CPU-hours. We document the post-processing pipeline and validate the frame transformation and waveforms. Eccentricity is measured from the waveforms and compared against the initial data. The first law of binary black hole mechanics, a test of approximate helical symmetry, is satisfied to better than 0.54% for every configuration with e_ω < 0.2, and we show that even precessing systems can be regarded as possessing approximate helical symmetry in the co-precessing frame. Using the aligned-spin simulations to calibrate the numerical floor, the co-precessing approximation's mirror-symmetry violation lies three to four ordersof magnitude above it, growing from 0.7% to 5.3%with opening angle. EccPrecDiff002 spans the band above 5 Hz without hybridisationfor M ≤ 62 M_⊙, giving a single-interferometer signal-to-noise ratio of 961 in Cosmic Explorer at 1 Gpc.
ER -