English

Impact of gravitational radiation higher order modes on single aligned-spin gravitational wave searches for binary black holes

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2016-04-20 v2

Abstract

Current template-based gravitational wave searches for compact binary coalescences (CBC) use waveform models that neglect the higher order modes content of the gravitational radiation emitted, considering only the quadrupolar (,m)=(2,2)(\ell,|m|)=(2,2) modes. We study the effect of such a neglection for the case of aligned-spin CBC searches for equal-spin (and non-spinning) binary black holes in the context of two versions of Advanced LIGO: the upcoming 2015 version, known as early Advanced LIGO (eaLIGO) and its Zero-Detuned High Energy Power version, that we will refer to as Advanced LIGO (AdvLIGO). In addition, we study the case of a non-spinning search for initial LIGO (iLIGO). We do this via computing the effectualness of the aligned-spin SEOBNRv1 ROM waveform family, which only considers quadrupolar modes, towards hybrid post-Newtonian/Numerical Relativity waveforms which contain higher order modes. We find that for all LIGO versions, losses of more than 10%10\% of events occur for mass ratio q6q\geq6 and M100MM \geq 100M_\odot due to the neglection of higher modes. Moreover, for iLIGO and eaLIGO, losses notably increase up to (39,23)%(39,23)\% respectively for the highest mass (220M)(220M_\odot) and mass ratio (q=8q=8) studied. For the case of early AdvLIGO, losses of 10%10\% occur for M>50MM>50M_\odot and q6q\geq6. Neglection of higher modes leads to observation-averaged systematic parameter biases towards lower spin, total mass and chirp mass. For completeness, we perform a preliminar, non-exhaustive comparison of systematic biases to statistical errors. We find that, for a given SNR, systematic biases dominate over statistical errors at much lower total mass for eaLIGO than for AdvLIGO.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1511.02060,
  title  = {Impact of gravitational radiation higher order modes on single aligned-spin gravitational wave searches for binary black holes},
  author = {Juan Calderón Bustillo and Sascha Husa and Alicia M. Sintes and Michael Pürrer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.02060},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

11 pages, 10 figures