Significant increase in sensitive volume of a gravitational wave search upon including higher harmonics
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arXiv
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866912221206937600 |
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| author | Mehta, Ajit Kumar Wadekar, Digvijay Roulet, Javier Anantpurkar, Isha Venumadhav, Tejaswi Mushkin, Jonathan Zackay, Barak Zaldarriaga, Matias Islam, Tousif |
| author_facet | Mehta, Ajit Kumar Wadekar, Digvijay Roulet, Javier Anantpurkar, Isha Venumadhav, Tejaswi Mushkin, Jonathan Zackay, Barak Zaldarriaga, Matias Islam, Tousif |
| contents | Most gravitational wave searches to date have included only the quadrupole mode in their search templates. Here, we demonstrate that incorporating higher harmonics improves the search sensitive volume for detecting binary black hole mergers, challenging the conclusion of previous studies. Using the $\tt{IAS-HM}$ detection pipeline, and the simulated (injection) signals from the LIGO-Virgo-Kagra (LVK) collaboration, we quantify the improvement in sensitivity due to the inclusion of higher harmonics. This improvement is significant for systems with higher mass ratios and larger total masses, with gains in sensitivity even exceeding $100\%$ at certain high masses. We also show that, due to using a marginalized detection statistic, the $\tt{IAS-HM}$ pipeline performs roughly as well as its quadrupole-mode-only counterpart even for equal mass-ratio mergers, and its sensitive volume is either better than or comparable to that of the individual LVK pipelines. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_17939 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Significant increase in sensitive volume of a gravitational wave search upon including higher harmonics Mehta, Ajit Kumar Wadekar, Digvijay Roulet, Javier Anantpurkar, Isha Venumadhav, Tejaswi Mushkin, Jonathan Zackay, Barak Zaldarriaga, Matias Islam, Tousif General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics Most gravitational wave searches to date have included only the quadrupole mode in their search templates. Here, we demonstrate that incorporating higher harmonics improves the search sensitive volume for detecting binary black hole mergers, challenging the conclusion of previous studies. Using the $\tt{IAS-HM}$ detection pipeline, and the simulated (injection) signals from the LIGO-Virgo-Kagra (LVK) collaboration, we quantify the improvement in sensitivity due to the inclusion of higher harmonics. This improvement is significant for systems with higher mass ratios and larger total masses, with gains in sensitivity even exceeding $100\%$ at certain high masses. We also show that, due to using a marginalized detection statistic, the $\tt{IAS-HM}$ pipeline performs roughly as well as its quadrupole-mode-only counterpart even for equal mass-ratio mergers, and its sensitive volume is either better than or comparable to that of the individual LVK pipelines. |
| title | Significant increase in sensitive volume of a gravitational wave search upon including higher harmonics |
| topic | General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17939 |