Effectual template bank for the detection of gravitational waves from inspiralling compact binaries with generic spins

Abstract

We report the construction of a three-dimensional template bank for the search for gravitational waves from inspiralling binaries consisting of spinning compact objects. The parameter space consists of two dimensions describing the mass parameters and one “reduced-spin” parameter, which describes the secular (nonprecessing) spin effects in the waveform. The template placement is based on an efficient stochastic algorithm and makes use of the semianalytical computation of a metric in the parameter space. We demonstrate that for “low-mass” (m₁ + m₂ ≤ 12 M⊙) binaries, this template bank achieves effective fitting factors ∼ 0.92– 0.99 towards signals from generic spinning binaries in the advanced detector era over the entire parameter space of interest (including binary neutron stars, binary black holes, and black-hole neutron-star binaries). This provides a powerful and viable method for searching for gravitational waves from generic spinning low-mass compact binaries. Under the assumption that spin magnitudes of black holes (neutron stars) are uniformly distributed between 0–0.98 [0–0.4] and spin angles are isotropically distributed, the expected improvement in the average detection volume (at a fixed signal-to-noise-ratio threshold) of a search using this reduced-spin bank is ∼20%–52%, as compared to a search using a nonspinning bank.