Setting the cornerstone for a family of models for gravitational waves from compact binaries: The dominant harmonic for nonprecessing quasicircular black holes

In this paper we present IMRPHENOMXAS, a thorough overhaul of the IMRPHENOMD [S. Husa et al., Phys. Rev. D 93, 044006 (2016); S. Khan et al., Phys. Rev. D 93, 044007 (2016)] waveform model, which describes the dominant l = 2, vertical bar m vertical bar = 2 spherical harmonic mode of nonprecessing coalescing black holes in terms of piecewise closed form expressions in the frequency domain. Improvements include in particular the accurate treatment of unequal spin effects, and the inclusion of extreme mass ratio waveforms. IMRPHENOMD has previously been extended to approximately include spin precession [M. Hannam et aL, Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 151101 (2014)] and subdominant spherical harmonics [L. London et aL, Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 161102 (2018)], and with its extensions it has become a standard tool in gravitational wave parameter estimation. Improved extensions of IMRPHENOMXAS are discussed in companion papers [C. Garcia-Quiros et al., Phys. Rev. D 102, 064002 (2020); G. Pratten et al., arXiv:2004.06503].