Addressing the spin question in gravitational-wave searches: Waveform templates for inspiralling compact binaries with nonprecessing spins

Abstract

This paper presents a post-Newtonian (PN) template family of gravitational waveforms from inspiralling compact binaries with nonprecessing spins, where the spin effects are described by a single “reduced-spin” parameter. This template family, which reparametrizes all the spin-dependent PN terms in terms of the leading-order (1.5PN) spin-orbit coupling term in an approximate way, has very high overlaps (fitting factor >0.99) with nonprecessing binaries with arbitrary mass ratios and spins. We also show that this template family is “effectual” for the detection of a significant fraction of generic spinning binaries in the comparable-mass regime (m₂/m₁ ≤ 10), providing an attractive and feasible way of searching for gravitational waves from spinning low-mass binaries. We also show that the secular (nonoscillatory) spin-dependent effects in the phase evolution (which are taken into account by the nonprecessing templates) are more important than the oscillatory effects of precession in the comparable-mass (m₁ ≅ m₂) regime. Hence the effectualness of nonspinning templates is particularly poor in this case, as compared to non-precessing-spin templates. For the case of binary neutron stars observable by Advanced LIGO, even moderate spins (^L_N·S/m²≅0.015-0.1) will cause considerable mismatches (∼3%–25%) with nonspinning templates. This is contrary to the expectation that neutron-star spins may not be relevant for gravitational wave detection.