paper

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

arXiv:1107.1267 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.84.084037

Abstract

This paper presents a post-Newtonian (PN) template family of gravitational waveforms from inspiralling compact binaries with non-precessing 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 \emph{in an approximate way}, has very high overlaps (fitting factor > 0.99) with non-precessing 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 (m_2/m_1 <~ 10), providing an attractive and feasible way of searching for gravitational waves (GWs) from spinning low-mass binaries. We also show that the secular (non-oscillatory) spin-dependent effects in the phase evolution (which are taken into account by the non-precessing templates) are more important than the oscillatory effects of precession in the comparable-mass (m_1 ~= m_2) regime. Hence the effectualness of non-spinning 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 . S/m^2 ~= 0.015 - 0.1) will cause considerable mismatches (~ 3% - 25%) with non-spinning templates. This is contrary to the expectation that neutron-star spins may not be relevant for GW detection.

16 pages, 11 figures, More material added, Some changes to clarify the presentation

References in corpus (28)

Cited by in corpus (146)