A quasi-physical family of gravity-wave templates for precessing binaries of spinning compact objects: Application to double-spin precessing binaries

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simplified family of gravitational wave templates for precessing binary systems, demonstrating their effectiveness in detection and parameter estimation within a specific mass range using ground-based interferometers.

Contribution

It proposes a quasi-physical single-spin template family for double-spin precessing binaries, improving detection efficiency and parameter estimation accuracy.

Findings

Single-spin templates match double-spin signals well for certain mass ranges.

Approximately 320,000 templates needed for high match in LIGO-I sensitivity.

Single-spin templates can estimate parameters of double-spin binaries effectively.

Abstract

The gravitational waveforms emitted during the adiabatic inspiral of precessing binaries with two spinning compact bodies of comparable masses, evaluated within the post-Newtonian approximation, can be reproduced rather accurately by the waveforms obtained by setting one of the two spins to zero, at least for the purpose of detection by ground-based gravitational-wave interferometers. Here we propose to use this quasi-physical family of single-spin templates to search for the signals emitted by double-spin precessing binaries, and we find that its signal-matching performance is satisfactory for source masses (m1,m2) in [3,15]Msun x [3,15]Msun. For this mass range, using the LIGO-I design sensitivity, we estimate that the number of templates required to yield a minimum match of 0.97 is ~320,000. We discuss also the accuracy to which the single-spin template family can be used to estimate the parameters of the original double-spin precessing binaries.