2025/01/29 by A. K. Mehta, Digvijay Wadekar, Mehta, Ajit Kumar +15 · 1 citation
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Statistical and numerical algorithms
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2501.17939
openalex publication_date 2025/01/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Most gravitational wave searches to date have included only the quadrupole mode in their search templates. Here, we demonstrate that incorporating higher harmonics improves the search sensitive volume for detecting binary black hole mergers, challenging the conclusion of previous studies. Using the \ttIAS-HM detection pipeline, and the simulated (injection) signals from the LIGO-Virgo-Kagra (LVK) collaboration, we quantify the improvement in sensitivity due to the inclusion of higher harmonics. This improvement is significant for systems with higher mass ratios and larger total masses, with gains in sensitivity even exceeding 100% at certain high masses. We also show that, due to using a marginalized detection statistic, the \ttIAS-HM pipeline performs roughly as well as its quadrupole-mode-only counterpart even for equal mass-ratio mergers, and its sensitive volume is either better than or comparable to that of the individual LVK pipelines.