BHPWave: A perturbative gravitational waveform model for rotating black holes

We present BHPWave, a new open-source waveform model that uses black hole perturbation theory to simulate the gravitational wave signals of stellar-mass compact objects undergoing quasi-circular inspirals into rotating massive black holes. These so-called extreme-mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs) will be ideal sources for future mHz gravitational wave detectors, such as LISA. Designing fast and accurate EMRI waveforms is critical to observing these systems. However, few open-access EMRI waveform generators currently exist, and those that do exist are either `kludge' models that rely on non-relativistic approximations or relativistic models that are restricted to non-rotating black holes. BHPWave bridges this gap by providing a freely-available generator that simulates EMRIs using the Teukolsky formalism and the adiabatic approximation from black hole perturbation theory. By restricting to quasi-circular inspirals, BHPWave can produce year-long signals in seconds in the time-domain or frequency-domain for EMRIs with dimensionless massive black hole spins between 0 and 0.995. In this talk we discuss the novel methods underlying BHPWave and how they might be applied to future EMRI waveform models. We also use BHPWave to demonstrate how errors in perturbation data impact the accuracy of EMRI gravitational waveforms.