2014/05/31 by Tito Dal Canton, Alexander H. Nitz, Andrew P. Lundgren +9 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.90.082004
published as Phys. Rev. D 90, 082004, 2014 · 17 pages, 12 figures; version accepted by PRD
arxiv created 2014/10/27 · arxiv updated 2014/10/28
We study the effect of spins on searches for gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences in realistic simulated early advanced LIGO data. We construct a detection pipeline including matched filtering, signal-based vetoes, a coincidence test between different detectors, and an estimate of the rate of background events. We restrict attention to neutron star--black hole (NS-BH) binary systems, and we compare a search using non-spinning templates to one using templates that include spins aligned with the orbital angular momentum. To run the searches we implement the binary inspiral matched-filter computation in PyCBC, a new software toolkit for gravitational-wave data analysis. We find that the inclusion of aligned-spin effects significantly increases the astrophysical reach of the search. Considering astrophysical NS-BH systems with non-precessing black hole spins, for dimensionless spin components along the orbital angular momentum uniformly distributed in (-1, 1), the sensitive volume of the search with aligned-spin templates is increased by ∼ 50% compared to the non-spinning search; for signals with aligned spins uniformly distributed in the range (0.7,1), the increase in sensitive volume is a factor of ∼ 10.