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Published June 7, 2010 | public
Journal Article

Systematic errors in measuring parameters of non-spinning compact binary coalescences with post-Newtonian templates

Abstract

We study the astrophysical impact of inaccurate and incomplete modeling of the gravitational waveforms from compact binary coalescences (CBCs). We do so by the matched filtering of phenomenological inspiral-merger-ringdown (IMR) signals with a bank of inspiral-phase templates modeled on the 3.5 post-Newtonian TaylorT1 approximant. The rationale for the choice of the templates is threefold. (1) The inspiral phase of the phenomenological IMR signals, which are an example of complete IMR signals, is modeled on the same TaylorT1 approximant. (2) In the low-mass limit, where the merger and ringdown phases are much shorter than the inspiral phase, the errors should tend to vanishingly small values and, thus, provide an important check on the numerical aspects of our simulations. (3) Since the binary black hole signals are not yet known for mass ratios above ten and since signals from CBCs involving neutron stars are affected by uncertainties in the knowledge of their equation of state, inspiral templates are still in use in searches for those signals. The results from our numerical simulations are compared with analytical calculations of the systematic errors using the Fisher matrix on the template parameter space. We find that the loss in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) can be as large as 45% even for binary black holes with component masses m_1 = 10 M_☉ and m_2 = 40 M_☉. Also the estimated total mass for the same pair can be off by as much as 20%. Both of these are worse for some higher mass combinations. Even the estimation of the symmetric mass ratio η suffers a nearly 20% error for this example and can be worse than 50% for the mass ranges studied here. These errors significantly dominate their statistical counterparts (at a nominal SNR of 10). It may, however, be possible to mitigate the loss in SNR by allowing for templates with unphysical values of η.

Additional Information

© 2010 IOP Publishing Ltd. Received 30 November 2009, in final form 2 March 2010. Published 10 May 2010. Two of us (SB and SG) would like to thank Bruce Allen for his warm hospitality during their stay at Hannover. Some of the computations reported in this paper were performed on the Atlas supercomputing cluster at the Albert Einstein Institute, Hannover. SB also thanks the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California Santa Barbara, and the Aspen Center for Physics, Aspen, Colorado, where early parts of this work were completed. This work is supported in part by NSF grants PHY-0758172, PHY-0855679, PHY-0653653 and PHY-0601459, and the David and Barbara Groce Fund at Caltech. LIGO was constructed by the California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology with funding from the National Science Foundation and operates under cooperative agreement PHY-0757058.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023