Systematic errors for matched filtering of gravitational waves from inspiraling compact binaries

We computed a thorough set of ambiguity functions with templates corresponding to various post-Newtonian approximations of the real signal. We study the detection of gravitational waves emitted by the inspiraling phase of compact binaries in order to study systematically the induced bias in the parameters. The noise spectrum is taken from the VIRGO interferometer, which has an effective frequency range larger than the one predicted for LIGO. We first confirm the results of previous authors that the Newtonian filter has a very low capability of detection and that the 2 PN restricted wave form is good enough for detection in the case of neutron stars binaries. Moreover, we also show that constant spins aligned with the orbital momentum have no significant effect in on-line selection. We point out that the maximization may lead to unphysical values of parameters to compensate the systematic errors due to imperfectly modeled templates, so that one should use a wider range of variation of the mass ratio parameter $\nu =$ reduced mass over the total mass (not restricted to $0<~\nu <~1/4).$ We also demonstrate that the higher harmonics at one and three times the orbital frequency cannot always be neglected for detection. The loss of signal to noise ratio amounts to 6% with $1.4$ and $10$ solar masses binary in certain cases.