Improving the sensitivity of a search for coalescing binary black holes with nonprecessing spins in gravitational wave data

Stephen Privitera, Satyanarayan R. P. Mohapatra, Parameswaran Ajith, Kipp Cannon, Nickolas Fotopoulos, Melissa A. Frei, Chad Hanna, Alan J. Weinstein, and John T. Whelan
Phys. Rev. D 89, 024003 – Published 8 January 2014

Abstract

We demonstrate for the first time a search pipeline with improved sensitivity to gravitational waves from coalescing binary black holes with spins aligned to the orbital angular momentum by the inclusion of spin effects in the search templates. We study the pipeline recovery of simulated gravitational wave signals from aligned-spin binary black holes added to real detector noise, comparing the pipeline performance with aligned-spin filter templates to the same pipeline with nonspinning filter templates. Our results exploit a three-parameter phenomenological waveform family that models the full inspiral-merger-ringdown coalescence and treats the effect of aligned spins with a single effective spin parameter χ. We construct template banks from these waveforms by a stochastic placement method and use these banks as filters in the recently developed gstlal search pipeline. We measure the observable volume of the analysis pipeline for binary black hole signals with Mtotal and χ[0,0.85]. We find an increase in observable volume of up to 45% for systems with 0.2χ0.85 with almost no loss of sensitivity to signals with 0χ0.2. We also show that the use of spinning templates in the search pipeline provides for more accurate recovery of the binary mass parameters as well as an estimate of the effective spin parameter. We demonstrate this analysis on 25.9 days of data obtained from the Hanford and Livingston detectors in LIGO’s fifth observation run.

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  • Received 23 October 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.89.024003

© 2014 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Stephen Privitera1,*, Satyanarayan R. P. Mohapatra2,3,†, Parameswaran Ajith4,‡, Kipp Cannon5,§, Nickolas Fotopoulos1, Melissa A. Frei2, Chad Hanna6,¶, Alan J. Weinstein1,**, and John T. Whelan2,††

  • 1LIGO Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 1200 East California Boulevard, Pasadena, California 91125, USA
  • 2Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation and School of Mathematical Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology, 85 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, New York 14623, USA
  • 3Department of Physics, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York 13244, USA
  • 4International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore 560012, India
  • 5Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, 60 St. George Street, Toronto M5S 38H, Canada
  • 6Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, 31 Caroline Street North, Waterloo N2L 6B9, Canada

  • *sprivite@ligo.caltech.edu
  • satya@astro.rit.edu
  • ajith@icts.res.in
  • §kcannon@cita.utoronto.ca
  • channa@perimeterinstitute.ca
  • **ajw@ligo.caltech.edu
  • ††john.whelan@ligo.org

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Vol. 89, Iss. 2 — 15 January 2014

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