BOB the (Waveform) Builder: Optimizing Analytical Black-Hole Binary Merger Waveforms

The Backwards-One-Body (BOB) model provides a fully analytical and physically motivated description of the merger-ringdown gravitational radiation emanating from a black hole binary merger. We perform a comprehensive validation of BOB for the dominant (2,2) mode of quasi-circular and non-precessing systems, assessing its accuracy against numerical relativity (NR) simulations, state-of-the-art waveform models, and a sum of quasinormal modes. We demonstrate that BOB most accurately describes the gravitational wave news, achieving accuracy comparable to highly-calibrated Effective-One-Body and NR surrogate models. Because BOB is minimally tuned to NR catalogs, it retains a high level of accuracy in regions of the parameter space sparsely covered by current NR catalogs. BOB yields an analytic link between the amplitude of the fundamental quasinormal mode and the peak amplitude of the News, which we verify to within the errors of a surrogate ringdown model. We identify a flavor of BOB that requires only the remnant mass and spin, yet matches the accuracy of models that fit a sum of many overtones. Lastly, we show that BOB accurately models both the mass and current quadrupole waves for superkick configurations. Our findings establish BOB as a powerful tool for gravitational wave analysis, for providing independent tests of NR-calibrated models, and for better understanding the underlying physics of the merger.