Preparations for detecting and characterizing gravitational-wave signals from binary black hole coalescences

TL;DR

This study assesses the effectiveness of EOBNR waveform models in detecting non-spinning binary black hole signals in simulated LIGO-Virgo data, showing slight efficiency loss compared to ideal models and highlighting the benefits of a coherent search stage.

Contribution

It evaluates the detection performance of EOBNR waveforms against numerical relativity signals in a realistic simulated data environment, emphasizing the impact of coherent analysis.

Findings

EOBNR templates are slightly less efficient than ideal models for detection.

Coherent search improves detection efficiency by a few percent.

Detection performance is robust across multiple NR-based signal families.

Abstract

We evaluate how well EOBNR waveforms, obtained from the effective one-body formalism, perform in detecting gravitational wave (GW) signals from binary black hole (BBH) coalescences modelled by numerical relativity (NR) groups participating in the second edition of the numerical injection analysis (NINJA-2). In this study, NINJA-2 NR-based signals that are available in the public domain were injected in simulated Gaussian, stationary data prepared for three LIGO-Virgo detectors with early Advanced LIGO sensitivities. Here we studied only non-spinning BBH signals. A total of 2000 such signals from 20 NR-based signal families were injected in a two-month long data set. The all-sky, all-time compact binary coalescence (CBC) search pipeline was run along with an added coherent stage to search for those signals. We find that the EOBNR templates are only slightly less efficient (by a few percent) in detecting non-spinning NR-based signals than in detecting EOBNR injections. On the other hand, the coherent stage improves the signal detectability by a few percent over a coincident search.