| Summary: | This Letter presents a publicly available catalog of 174 numerical binary black hole simulations following up to 35 orbits. The catalog includes 91 precessing binaries, mass ratios up to 8:1, orbital eccentricities from a few percent to 10^(-5), black hole spins up to 98% of the theoretical maximum, and radiated energies up to 11.1% of the initial mass. We establish remarkably good agreement with post-Newtonian precession of orbital and spin directions for two new precessing simulations, and we discuss other applications of this catalog. Formidable challenges remain: e.g., precession complicates the connection of numerical and approximate analytical waveforms, and vast regions of the parameter space remain unexplored. © 2013 American Physical Society. Received 27 May 2013; revised 5 September 2013; published 11 December 2013. We thank Christian Ott and Kip Thorne for helpful discussions. This work was supported in part by NSERC of Canada, the Canada Chairs Program, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research; the Sherman Fairchild Foundation; and NSF Grants No. PHY-0969111 and No. PHY-1005426 at Cornell, NSF Grants No. PHY-1068881, No. PHY-1005655, and No. DMS-1065438 at Caltech, and NSF Grant No. PHY-1307489 at Cal State Fullerton. Simulations used in this work were computed with the SpEC code [27]. Computations were performed on the Zwicky cluster at Caltech, which is supported by the Sherman Fairchild Foundation and by NSF Grant No. PHY-0960291; on the NSF XSEDE network under Grant No. TG-PHY990007N; on the Orca Cluster supported by Cal State Fullerton; and on the GPC Supercomputer at the SciNet HPC Consortium [78]. SciNet is funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation under the auspices of Compute Canada, the Government of Ontario, Ontario Research Fund—Research Excellence, and the University of Toronto. Published - PhysRevLett.111.241104.pdf Submitted - 1304.6077v3.pdf
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