Recovering a spinning inspiralling compact binary waveform immersed in LIGO-like noise with spinning templates

TL;DR

This study assesses the effectiveness of matched filtering in recovering highly spinning compact binary waveforms from LIGO-like noise, highlighting challenges in accurately estimating spins despite good mass recovery.

Contribution

It demonstrates the limitations of current spinning waveform templates in accurately recovering spin parameters from noisy gravitational wave data.

Findings

Masses are reasonably well recovered, slightly overestimated.

Spin parameters are poorly recovered, with significant discrepancies.

Matching methods need improvement to better extract spin information.

Abstract

We investigate the recovery chances of highly spinning waveforms immersed in LIGO S5-like noise by performing a matched filtering with 10^6 randomly chosen spinning waveforms generated with the LAL package. While the masses of the compact binary are reasonably well recovered (slightly overestimated), the same does not hold true for the spins. We show the best fit matches both in the time-domain and the frequency-domain. These encompass some of the spinning characteristics of the signal, but far less than what would be required to identify the astrophysical parameters of the system. An improvement of the matching method is necessary, though may be difficult due to the noisy signal.