• DOI:10.1103/PhysRevD.94.024012
• Corpus ID: 119110987

Searching for Gravitational Waves from Compact Binaries with Precessing Spins

@article{Harry2016SearchingFG,
  title={Searching for Gravitational Waves from Compact Binaries with Precessing Spins},
  author={Ian Harry and Stephen Privitera and Alejandro Boh'e and Alessandra Buonanno},
  journal={Physical Review D},
  year={2016},
  volume={94},
  pages={024012}
}

• I. Harry, S. Privitera, +1 author A. Buonanno
• Published 8 March 2016
• Physics
• Physical Review D

of these banks towards simulated populations of generic-spin systems. We then use these banks in a pipeline analysis of Gaussian noise to measure the increase in background incurred by using generic- instead of aligned-spin banks. Although the generic-spin banks have a factor of ten to twenty more templates than the aligned-spin banks, we nd an overall improvement in signal recovery at xed false-alarm rate for systems with high-mass ratio and highly precessing spins |up to 60% for neutron-star{ black-hole mergers. This gain in sensitivity comes at a small loss of sensitivity (.4%) for systems that are already well-covered by aligned-spin templates. Since the observation of even a single binary merger with misalinged spins could provide unique astrophysical insights into the formation of these sources, we recommend that the method described here be developed further to mount a viable search for generic-spin binary mergers in LIGO/Virgo data.