Comparison of subdominant gravitational wave harmonics between post-Newtonian and numerical relativity calculations and construction of multi-mode hybrids

Abstract: Gravitational waveforms which describe the inspiral, merger and ringdown of coalescing binaries are usually constructed by synthesising information from perturbative descriptions, in particular post-Newtonian theory and black-hole perturbation theory, with numerical solutions of the full Einstein equations. In this paper we discuss the "glueing" of numerical and post-Newtonian waveforms to produce hybrid waveforms which include subdominant spherical harmonics ("higher order modes"), and focus in particular on the process of consistently aligning the waveforms, which requires a comparison of both descriptions and a discussion of their imprecisions. We restrict to the non-precessing case, and illustrate the process using numerical waveforms of up to mass ratio $q=18$ produced with the BAM code, and publicly available waveforms from the SXS catalogue. The results also suggest new ways of analysing finite radius errors in numerical simulations.