The Importance of BMS Frames for Gravitational Wave Modeling

As was realized by Bondi, Metzner, van der Burg, and Sachs (BMS), the symmetry group of asymptotic infinity is not the Poincaré group, but an infinite dimensional group called the BMS group. Because of this, understanding the BMS frame of the gravitational waves produced by numerical relativity is crucial for ensuring that analyses and comparisons with other waveform models are performed properly. Up until now, however, the BMS frame of numerical waveforms has not been thoroughly examined, largely because the necessary tools have not existed. In this talk, I will highlight an improved method for fixing the BMS frame of numerical waveforms. Following this, I will then illustrate how this new scheme of fixing the BMS frame allows for much faster and more correct comparisons between numerical relativity waveforms and either Post-Newtonian or Quasi-normal Mode models, which will prove vitally important for testing Einstein's theory of relativity with observations obtained by gravitational wave observatories.