Previous analytic and numerical calculations suggest that, at each instant, the emission from a processing black-hole binary closely resembles the emission from a nonprecessing analog. In this paper ...we quantitatively explore the validity and limitations of that correspondence, extracting the radiation from a large collection of 224 generic black-hole binary merger simulations both in the simulation frame and in a corotating frame that tracks precession. To a first approximation, the corotating-frame waveforms resemble nonprecessing analogs, based on similarity over a band-limited frequency interval defined using a fiducial detector (here, advanced LIGO) and the source's total mass M. By restricting attention to masses M setmembership 100, 1000Mmiddot in circle that our comparisons are sensitive only to our simulated late-time inspirai, merger, and ringdown signals. In this mass region, every one of our processing simulations can be fit by some physically similar member of the IMRPHENOMB phenomenological waveform family to better than 95%; most fit significantly better. The best-fit parameters at low and high mass correspond to natural physical limits: the pre-merger orbit and post-merger perturbed black hole. Our results suggest that physically motivated synthetic signals can be derived by viewing radiation from suitable nonprecessing binaries in a suitable nonintertial reference frame. While a good first approximation, processing systems have degrees of freedom (i.e., the transverse spins) which a nonprecessing simulation cannot reproduce. We quantify the extent to which these missing degrees of freedom limit the utility of synthetic processing signals for detection and parameter estimation.
We describe the implementation of a search for gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences in LIGO and Virgo data. This all-sky, all-time, multidetector search for binary coalescence has ...been used to search data taken in recent LIGO and Virgo runs. The search is built around a matched filter analysis of the data, augmented by numerous signal consistency tests designed to distinguish artifacts of non-Gaussian detector noise from potential detections. We demonstrate the search performance using Gaussian noise and data from the fifth LIGO science run and demonstrate that the signal consistency tests are capable of mitigating the effect of non-Gaussian noise and providing a sensitivity comparable to that achieved in Gaussian noise.
We describe the implementation of a search for gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences in LIGO and Virgo data. This all-sky, all-time, multi-detector search for binary coalescence has ...been used to search data taken in recent LIGO and Virgo runs. The search is built around a matched filter analysis of the data, augmented by numerous signal consistency tests designed to distinguish artifacts of non-Gaussian detector noise from potential detections. We demonstrate the search performance using Gaussian noise and data from the fifth LIGO science run and demonstrate that the signal consistency tests are capable of mitigating the effect of non-Gaussian noise and providing a sensitivity comparable to that achieved in Gaussian noise.
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