Implementing a search for aligned-spin neutron star -- black hole systems with advanced ground based gravitational wave detectors

Abstract

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 $\sim 50\%$ 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 $\sim 10$.

17 pages, 12 figures; version accepted by PRD

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• GW170814: A Three-Detector Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Coalescence
• Upper limits on the rates of binary neutron star and neutron-star--black-hole mergers from Advanced LIGO's first observing run
• Sensitivity of gravitational wave searches to the full signal of intermediate mass black hole binaries during the LIGO O1 Science Run
• Impact of precession on aligned-spin searches for neutron-star--black-hole binaries
• A classifier for gravitational-wave inspiral signals in non-ideal single-detector data
• Matter Effects on LIGO/Virgo Searches for Gravitational Waves from Merging Neutron Stars
• Detecting compact binary coalescences with seedless clustering
• Obtaining Gravitational Waves from Inspiral Binary Systems using LIGO data
• Efficiency of nonspinning templates in gravitational wave searches for aligned-spin binary black holes