Impact of gravitational radiation higher order modes on single aligned-spin gravitational wave searches for binary black holes
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 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 of events occur for mass ratio and due to the neglection of higher modes. Moreover, for iLIGO and eaLIGO, losses notably increase up to respectively for the highest mass and mass ratio () studied. For the case of early AdvLIGO, losses of occur for and . 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