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Free keywords:
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology, gr-qc,Astrophysics, Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics, astro-ph.CO, Astrophysics, High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, astro-ph.HE
Abstract:
Current searches for the gravitational-wave signature of compact binary
mergers rely on matched-filtering data from interferometric observatories with
sets of modelled gravitational waveforms. These searches currently use model
waveforms that do not include the higher-order mode content of the
gravitational-wave signal. Higher-order modes are important for many compact
binary mergers and their omission reduces the sensitivity to such sources. In
this work we explore the sensitivity loss incurred from omitting higher-order
modes. We present a new method for searching for compact binary mergers using
waveforms that include higher-order mode effects, and evaluate the sensitivity
increase that using our new method would allow. We find that, when evaluating
sensitivity at a constant rate-of-false alarm, and when including the fact that
signal-consistency tests can reject some signals that include higher-order mode
content, we observe a sensitivity increase of up to a factor of 2 in volume for
high mass ratio, high total-mass systems. Our new search method is also
directly applicable in searches for generic compact binaries.
