Schedule Aug 03, 2012
Searching for Gravitational Waves from Non-Spinning Stellar-Mass Binary-Black-Holes using EOBNR and Taylor F2 Waveforms in the Advanced Detector Era
Prayush Kumar (Syracuse Univ.)

Stellar-mass black hole binary coalescences are expected to be likely candidates for detection with the advanced gravitational wave detectors. The searches for gravitational wave signals in the detector data will use the theoretical knowledge of gravitational waveforms to look for signals that are otherwise buried in instrumental noise. This is done by matched-filtering the detector data with a discrete bank of templates of theoretically modeled waveforms. The discreteness of the bank and the inaccuracy of the model waveforms introduces losses in the recovered SNR of the observed events from these searches. Most initial LIGO detection searches used template banks of frequency domain waveforms (Taylor F2), whose discrete set was placed using the Owen-Sathya bank placement metric. We present a study of the viability of using similar template banks of Taylor F2 waveforms, to search for GW signals from BBHs, using the Zero-Detuned High-Power noise PSD estimate for advanced LIGO. In the absence of knowledge of the exact waveform solution from BBH, we assume that the recently proposed Effective-One-Body (EOB) model with sub-leading waveform multipoles models such systems accurately. We also present a study the effectiveness of the Owen-Sathya bank placement metric, as a measure used to place template banks of the leading-order EOB waveform multipole (EOBNRv2). Also, we present a study of the viability of using EOBNRv2 template banks, just as we do for the Taylor F2 model, for detection of BBH.

View poster as pdf.

Author entry (protected)