Significant increase in sensitive volume of a gravitational wave search upon including higher harmonics
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology2025-02-06v2Cosmology and Nongalactic AstrophysicsHigh Energy Astrophysical PhenomenaInstrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Most gravitational wave searches to date have included only the quadrupole mode in their search templates. Here, we demonstrate that incorporating higher harmonics improves the search sensitive volume for detecting binary black hole mergers, challenging the conclusion of previous studies. Using the IAS−HM detection pipeline, and the simulated (injection) signals from the LIGO-Virgo-Kagra (LVK) collaboration, we quantify the improvement in sensitivity due to the inclusion of higher harmonics. This improvement is significant for systems with higher mass ratios and larger total masses, with gains in sensitivity even exceeding 100% at certain high masses. We also show that, due to using a marginalized detection statistic, the IAS−HM pipeline performs roughly as well as its quadrupole-mode-only counterpart even for equal mass-ratio mergers, and its sensitive volume is either better than or comparable to that of the individual LVK pipelines.
@article{arxiv.2501.17939,
title = {Significant increase in sensitive volume of a gravitational wave search upon including higher harmonics},
author = {Ajit Kumar Mehta and Digvijay Wadekar and Javier Roulet and Isha Anantpurkar and Tejaswi Venumadhav and Jonathan Mushkin and Barak Zackay and Matias Zaldarriaga and Tousif Islam},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.17939},
year = {2025}
}