Template banks to search for compact binaries with spinning components in gravitational wave data

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of different template banks in detecting gravitational waves from spinning compact binaries, finding that current non-spinning templates perform comparably to those modeling spin effects, and recommends continuing their use.

Contribution

The study introduces new phenomenological template banks for spinning binaries and compares their performance to existing non-spinning templates in gravitational wave searches.

Findings

Phenomenological templates perform similarly to non-spinning templates at the same false alarm rate.

Current non-spinning templates are sufficient until spin-including templates can reduce false alarms.

Recommendation to continue using non-spinning templates for gravitational wave detection.

Abstract

Gravitational waves from coalescing compact binaries are one of the most promising sources for detectors such as LIGO, Virgo and GEO600. If the components of the binary posess significant angular momentum (spin), as is likely to be the case if one component is a black hole, spin-induced precession of a binary's orbital plane causes modulation of the gravitational-wave amplitude and phase. If the templates used in a matched-filter search do not accurately model these effects then the sensitivity, and hence the detection rate, will be reduced. We investigate the ability of several search pipelines to detect gravitational waves from compact binaries with spin. We use the post-Newtonian approximation to model the inspiral phase of the signal and construct two new template banks using the phenomenological waveforms of Buonanno, Chen and Vallisneri. We compare the performance of these template banks to that of banks constructed using the stationary phase approximation to the non-spinning post-Newtonian inspiral waveform currently used by LIGO and Virgo in the search for compact binary coalescence. We find that, at the same false alarm rate, a search pipeline using phenomenological templates is no more effective than a pipeline which uses non-spinning templates. We recommend the continued use of the non-spinning stationary phase template bank until the false alarm rate associated with templates which include spin effects can be substantially reduced.