Mining black hole binary merger waveforms: characterising spinning intermediate mass black holes*

Coalescing spinning black hole binaries will imprint information about their initial and final mass and spin configuration on their emitted waves. ~ Though this imprint is relatively well understood before and after the merger phase, an understanding of the strongest, most nonlinear waves requires full numerical relativity. ~ We present an analysis of this imprint for specific waveforms from a lower-dimensional subspace of the full binary configuration space. ~More specifically, we estimate how many distinguishable quadrupolar waveforms are required to sparsely match any waveform in our subspaces. All waveforms used in our estimate have been realized numerically.