Searching for Gravitational Waves from the Inspiral of Precessing Binary Systems. I. Reduction of Detection Efficiency
Abstract
We consider the problem of searching for gravitational waves emitted during the inspiral phase of binary systems whose orbital plane precesses due to relativistic spin-orbit coupling. Such effect takes place when the spins of the binary system are misaligned with respect to the orbital angular momentum. We investigate the loss of signal-to-noise ratio and, hence, detection rate that occurs when the precession effects are not accounted for in the template waveforms. We restrict our analysis to binary systems that undergoes the so-called simple precession. For several values the individual masses of the binary system, we compute the fitting factor, and therefore the effect on the detection rate. We find that for binary systems with rather high mass ratios the detection rate could decrease by almost an order of magnitude. As present astrophysical estimates of the rate of binary inspiral events suggest that LIGO could detect at most a few events per year, the reduction of the detection rate even by a factor of a few is already critical. We determine regions of the parameter space for which the detection could be joepartized, if precession effects were neglected in the template waveforms. Further we examine whether the effect of precession could be included in the templates by capturing the main features of the phase modulation through a small number of extra parameters. Specifically we examine in detail the 3-parameter family suggested by Apostolatos. We find that, even though these ``mimic'' templates improve the detection rate, they are still inadequate in recovering the signal-to-noise ratio at the desired level. We conclude that a more complex template family is needed in the near future, still maintaining the number of additional parameters as small as possible in order to reduce the computational costs.Keywords
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