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General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology, gr-qc
Abstract:
We study the effect of spins on searches for gravitational waves from compact
binary coalescences in realistic simulated early advanced LIGO data. We
construct a detection pipeline including matched filtering, signal-based
vetoes, a coincidence test between different detectors, and an estimate of the
rate of background events. We restrict attention to neutron star--black hole
(NS-BH) binary systems, and we compare a search using non-spinning templates to
one using templates that include spins aligned with the orbital angular
momentum. To run the searches we implement the binary inspiral matched-filter
computation in PyCBC, a new software toolkit for gravitational-wave data
analysis. We find that the inclusion of aligned-spin effects significantly
increases the astrophysical reach of the search. Considering astrophysical
NS-BH systems with non-precessing black hole spins, for dimensionless spin
components along the orbital angular momentum uniformly distributed in $(-1,
1)$, the sensitive volume of the search with aligned-spin templates is
increased by $\sim 50\%$ compared to the non-spinning search; for signals with
aligned spins uniformly distributed in the range $(0.7,1)$, the increase in
sensitive volume is a factor of $\sim 10$.
