Comparing gravitational waves from nonprecessing and precessing black hole binaries in the corotating frame

Previous analytic and numerical calculations suggest that, at each instant, the emission from a precessing black-hole binary closely resembles the emission from a nonprecessing analog. In this paper we quantitatively explore the validity and limitations of that correspondence, extracting the radiation from a large collection of 224 generic black-hole binary merger simulations both in the simulation frame and in a corotating frame that tracks precession. To a first approximation, the corotating-frame waveforms resemble nonprecessing analogs, based on similarity over a band-limited frequency interval defined using a fiducial detector (here, advanced LIGO) and the source's total mass $M$. By restricting attention to masses $M\ensuremath{\in}100$, $1000{M}_{\ensuremath{\bigodot}}$, we ensure that our comparisons are sensitive only to our simulated late-time inspiral, merger, and ringdown signals. In this mass region, every one of our precessing simulations can be fit by some physically similar member of the IMRPhenomB phenomenological waveform family to better than 95%; most fit significantly better. The best-fit parameters at low and high mass correspond to natural physical limits: the pre-merger orbit and post-merger perturbed black hole. Our results suggest that physically motivated synthetic signals can be derived by viewing radiation from suitable nonprecessing binaries in a suitable nonintertial reference frame. While a good first approximation, precessing systems have degrees of freedom (i.e., the transverse spins) which a nonprecessing simulation cannot reproduce. We quantify the extent to which these missing degrees of freedom limit the utility of synthetic precessing signals for detection and parameter estimation.