Numerical Simulation Infrastructure For Gravitational Wave Data Analysis

The first gravitational waves from a merger of a binary neutron star system were detected less than a year ago, on August 17th 2017. This is still the only detection of gravitational waves involving neutron stars to date. Like binary black holes (BBH), investigations of binary neutron stars (BNS) rely on numerical simulations for the most accurate understanding of waveform dynamics at merger. Driven by several BBH detections to date, infrastructure for this analysis has been developed primarily for BBH. Meanwhile, infrastructure for BNS waveforms have not yet been fully incorporated. Using a standalone Python script, numerical binary neutron star mergers from third parties can now be converted into a format that can be uploaded and used inside the collaborative LALSuite/PyCBC projects to analyze the effects of numerical merger on searches and parameter estimation. The first examples of hybrid waveforms have also been generated using this system.