Precession in Compact Binary Inspirals

In this thesis, we examine precession effects in compact binary inspirals for two separate regimes. Regime one is that of stellar mass black holes with comparable masses and regime two is binary systems with extreme mass asymmetry. We first look at spin precession in regime one, which is a generic effect caused by the misalignment of spin and orbital angular momentum. As such, it is essential to have waveform models that faithfully incorporate this effect. We assess how well the current state of the art models achieve this by comparing their faithfulness to the numerical relativity surrogate \NRSUR{} and to numerical relativity waveforms.
We further examine how faithfully precessing waveform models can recover parameters in injection/recovery parameter estimation runs. We then turn our attention to regime two in which we investigate the correction to the geodetic (de Sitter) precession of a gyroscope due to the inclusion of the gyroscope's mass. We detail the numerical implementation for calculating this correction along timelike equatorial geodesics in Kerr spacetime.