Fully precessing higher-mode surrogate model of effective-one-body waveforms

We present a surrogate model of SEOBNRv4PHM, a fully precessing time-domain effective-one-body waveform model including subdominant modes. We follow an approach similar to that used to build recent numerical relativity surrogate models. Our surrogate is 5000 M in duration, covers mass ratios up to 1∶20 and dimensionless spin magnitudes up to 0.8. Validating the surrogate against an independent test set, we find that the median mismatch error is less than 10-3, which is typically smaller than the modeling error of SEOBNRv4PHM itself. At high total mass, a few percent of configurations can exceed mismatches of 10-2 if they are highly precessing and exceed a mass ratio of 1∶4. This surrogate is nearly 2 orders of magnitude faster than the underlying time-domain SEOBNRv4PHM model and can be evaluated in ∼50 ms. Bayesian inference analyses with SEOBNRv4PHM are typically very computationally demanding and can take from weeks to months to complete. The 2 order of magnitude speedup attained by our surrogate model enables practical parameter estimation analyses with this waveform family. This is crucial because Bayesian inference allows us to recover the masses and spins of binary black hole mergers given a model of the emitted gravitational waveform along with a description of the noise.