We present a comprehensive comparison between the numerical relativity (NR) angular momentum flux at infinity and the corresponding quantity entering the radiation reaction in teobresums, an effective one body (EOB) waveform model for nonprecessing coalescing black hole binaries on quasicircular orbits. This comparison prompted us to implement two changes in the model: (i) including next-to-quasi-circular corrections in the $\ell =m$, $\ell \le 5$ multipoles entering the radiation reaction and (ii) consequently updating the NR-informed spin-orbital sector of the model. This yields a new waveform model that presents a higher self-consistency between waveform and dynamics and an improved agreement with NR simulations. We test the model computing the EOB/NR unfaithfulness ${\overline{F}}_{\mathrm{EOB}/\mathrm{NR}}$ over all 534 spin-aligned configurations available through the Simulating eXtreme Spacetime catalog, notably using the noise spectral density of Advanced LIGO, Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer, for total mass up to $500M_{\odot }$. We find that the maximum unfaithfulness ${\overline{F}}_{\mathrm{EOB}/\mathrm{NR}}^{\max }$ is mostly between ${10}^{-4}$ and ${10}^{-3}$, and the performance progressively worsens up to $\sim 5\times {10}^{-3}$ as the effective spin of the system is increased. We perform similar analyses on the seobnrv4hm model, which delivers ${\overline{F}}_{\mathrm{EOB}/\mathrm{NR}}^{\max }$ values uniformly distributed versus effective spin and mostly between ${10}^{-3}$ and ${10}^{-2}$. We conclude that the improved teobresums model already represents a reliable and robust first step towards the development of highly accurate waveform templates for third generation detectors.

• Received 1 December 2021
• Accepted 16 March 2022

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.105.084025