Detection and characterization of spin-orbit resonances in the advanced gravitational wave detectors era

• Published in: arXiv.org
• Main Authors: Afle, Chaitanya, Gupta, Anuradha, Gadre, Bhooshan, Kumar, Prayush, Demos, Nick, Lovelace, Geoffrey, Han Gil Choi, Hyung Mok Lee, Mitra, Sanjit, Boyle, Michael, Hemberger, Daniel A, Kidder, Lawrence E, Pfeiffer, Harald P, Scheel, Mark A, Szilagyi, Bela
• Format: Paper Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ithaca Cornell University Library, arXiv.org 22.09.2018
• Subjects: Angular momentum; Approximants; Binary stars; Error analysis; Gravitational waves; Mathematical models; Numerical relativity; Orbital resonances (celestial mechanics); Parameters; Physics - General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology; Quadrupoles; Relativity; Waveforms
• ISSN: 2331-8422
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1803.07695

In this paper, we test the performance of templates in detection and characterization of Spin-orbit resonant (SOR) binaries. We use precessing SEOBNRv3 waveforms as well as {\it four} numerical relativity (NR) waveforms to model GWs from SOR binaries and filter them through IMRPhenomD, SEOBNRv4 (non-precessing) and IMRPhenomPv2 (precessing) approximants. We find that IMRPhenomD and SEOBNRv4 recover only \(\sim70\%\) of injections with fitting factor (FF) higher than 0.97 (or 90\% of injections with \({\rm FF} >0.9\)).However, using the sky-maxed statistic, IMRPhenomPv2 performs magnificently better than their non-precessing counterparts with recovering \(99\%\) of the injections with FFs higher than 0.97. Interestingly, injections with \(\Delta \phi = 180^{\circ}\) have higher FFs (\(\Delta \phi\) is the angle between the components of the black hole spins in the plane orthogonal to the orbital angular momentum) as compared to their \(\Delta \phi =0^{\circ}\) and generic counterparts. This implies that we will have a slight observation bias towards \(\Delta \phi=180^{\circ}\) SORs while using non-precessing templates for searches. All template approximants are able to recover most of the injected NR waveforms with FFs \(>0.95\). For all the injections including NR, the error in estimating chirp mass remains below \(<10\%\) with minimum error for \(\Delta \phi = 180^{\circ}\) resonant binaries. The symmetric mass ratio can be estimated with errors below \(15\%\). The effective spin parameter \(\chi_{\rm eff}\) is measured with maximum absolute error of 0.13. The in-plane spin parameter \(\chi_p\) is mostly underestimated indicating that a precessing signal will be recovered as a relatively less precessing signal. Based on our findings, we conclude that we not only need improvements in waveform models towards precession and non-quadrupole modes but also better search strategies for precessing GW signals.