Addressing the spin question in gravitational-wave searches: Waveform templates for inspiralling compact binaries with nonprecessing spins

Journal Article · Sat Oct 15 04:00:00 EDT 2011 · Physical Review. D, Particles Fields

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PHYSREVD.84.084037· OSTI ID:21607920

Ajith, P ^[1]

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1. LIGO Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125 (United States) and Theoretical Astrophysics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125 (United States)

This paper presents a post-Newtonian (PN) template family of gravitational waveforms from inspiralling compact binaries with nonprecessing spins, where the spin effects are described by a single 'reduced-spin' parameter. This template family, which reparametrizes all the spin-dependent PN terms in terms of the leading-order (1.5PN) spin-orbit coupling term in an approximate way, has very high overlaps (fitting factor >0.99) with nonprecessing binaries with arbitrary mass ratios and spins. We also show that this template family is 'effectual' for the detection of a significant fraction of generic spinning binaries in the comparable-mass regime (m{sub 2}/m{sub 1} < or approx. 10), providing an attractive and feasible way of searching for gravitational waves from spinning low-mass binaries. We also show that the secular (nonoscillatory) spin-dependent effects in the phase evolution (which are taken into account by the nonprecessing templates) are more important than the oscillatory effects of precession in the comparable-mass (m{sub 1}{approx_equal}m{sub 2}) regime. Hence the effectualness of nonspinning templates is particularly poor in this case, as compared to non-precessing-spin templates. For the case of binary neutron stars observable by Advanced LIGO, even moderate spins (L-circumflex{sub N}{center_dot}S/m{sup 2}{approx_equal}0.015-0.1) will cause considerable mismatches ({approx}3%-25%) with nonspinning templates. This is contrary to the expectation that neutron-star spins may not be relevant for gravitational wave detection.

• OSTI ID: 21607920
• Journal Information: Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Journal Name: Physical Review. D, Particles Fields Journal Issue: 8 Vol. 84; ISSN PRVDAQ; ISSN 0556-2821
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS
ANGULAR MOMENTUM
APPROXIMATIONS
CALCULATION METHODS
COUPLING
GRAVITATIONAL WAVE DETECTORS
INTERMEDIATE COUPLING
L-S COUPLING
MASS
MEASURING INSTRUMENTS
NEUTRON STARS
PARTICLE PROPERTIES
PRECESSION
RADIATION DETECTORS
SPIN
STARS
WAVE FORMS