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Multipolar gravitational waveforms for spinning binary black holes and their impact on source characterization

In the last five years, gravitational-wave astronomy has gone from a purely theoretical field into a thriving experimental science. Many gravitational-wave signals, emitted by stellar-mass binary black holes and binary neutron stars, have been detected, and many more are expected in the future. The observation of the gravitational-wave signals from these systems, and the characterization of their sources, heavily relies on the precise models for the emitted gravitational waveforms. In this thesis, I present an updated version of the waveform models for spinning binary black holes within the effective-one-body formalism. The novelty of the waveform models presented in this work is the inclusion of beyond-quadupolar terms in the waveforms emitted by spinning binary black holes. I first construct the model in the simplified case of black holes with spins aligned with the orbital angular momentum of the binary, then I extend it to the case of generic spin orientations. The measurement of the source properties of a binary system emitting gravitational waves requires to compute $\mathcal{O}(10^7-10^9)$ different waveforms. Since the waveform models mentioned before can require $\mathcal{O}(1-10)$s to generate a single waveform, they can be difficult to use in data-analysis studies. To overcome this obstacle, I use the reduced-order-modeling technique to develop a faster version of the waveform model for black holes with spins aligned to the orbital angular momentum of the binary. The waveform models developed in this thesis have been used by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations for the inference of the source parameters of the gravitational-wave signals detected during the second and third observing runs (O2 and O3) of the LIGO and Virgo detectors. Here, I present a study on the source properties of the signals GW170729 and GW190412, for which I have been directly involved in the analysis.