Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 0706.4437

Gravitational waves from inspiralling compact binaries: hexagonal template placement and its efficiency in detecting physical signals

Thomas Cokelaer
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Matched filtering is used to search for gravitational waves emitted by inspiralling compact binaries in data from the ground-based interferometers. One of the key aspects of the detection process is the design of a template bank that covers the astrophysically pertinent parameter space. In an earlier paper, we described a template bank that is based on a square lattice. Although robust, we showed that the square placement is over-efficient, with the implication that it is computationally more demanding than required. In this paper, we present a template bank based on an hexagonal lattice, which size is reduced by 40% with respect to the proposed square placement. We describe the practical aspects of the hexagonal template bank implementation, its size, and computational cost. We have also performed exhaustive simulations to characterize its efficiency and safeness. We show that the bank is adequate to search for a wide variety of binary systems (primordial black holes, neutron stars and stellar mass black holes) and in data from both current detectors (initial LIGO, Virgo and GEO600) as well as future detectors (advanced LIGO and EGO). Remarkably, although our template bank placement uses a metric arising from a particular template family, namely stationary phase approximation, we show that it can be used successfully with other template families (e.g., Pade resummation and effective one-body approximation). This quality of being effective for different template families makes the proposed bank suitable for a search that would use several of them in parallel (e.g., in a binary black hole search). The hexagonal template bank described in this paper is currently used to search for non-spinning inspiralling compact binaries in data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

Explore related subjects

gr-qc

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Thomas Cokelaer. 2007-06-29. Gravitational waves from inspiralling compact binaries: hexagonal template placement and its efficiency in detecting physical signals. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.76.102004

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Electrovacuum Black Hole Uniqueness

We prove the black hole uniqueness conjecture in the axially symmetric, stationary, electrovacuum setting, subject to the refined asymptotic analysis of the associated singular harmonic maps, which includes an analyticity hypothesis at the axes. More precisely, it is shown that any asymptotically flat solution of the Einstein--Maxwell equations in this class, with more than one black hole horizon component is either: Majumdar--Papapetrou, up to a duality rotation, in which case all logarithmic angle defects vanish, or every finite axis rod logarithmic angle defect is strictly negative and hence every interaction force is strictly attractive. The proof extends the singular harmonic map method used for vacuum Kerr uniqueness in [18].

gr-qc↗
arXiv2026

Constraining Modified Mass-to-Horizon Cosmology Through Primordial Inflationary Observables

We investigate slow-roll inflation in a modified cosmological framework inspired by a generalized mass-to-horizon relation (MHR), $M=\gamma {c^2 L^n}/{G}$, where $n$ is a real parameter and $\gamma$ a dimensional constant. Using Padmanabhan's emergence paradigm, we derive the modified Friedmann equations for a flat FRW universe and analyze the dynamics of a canonical scalar field (inflaton) under the slow-roll approximation. We study the resulting inflationary phenomenology for power-law and Starobinsky potentials. For power-law potentials, the MHR modification fails to reconcile these models with current CMB constraints on $r$ and $n_s$. In contrast, Starobinsky inflation exhibits significant sensitivity to deviations from $n=1$. A perturbative analysis ($n=1+\Delta$) yields corrections to inflationary observables. We observe that the scalar power-spectrum normalization, under a fixed-Starobinsky prescription, imposes the stringent constraint $0.960 \lesssim n \lesssim 1.040$ for $N=60$ efolds. This is considerably tighter than spectral-index bounds. Our results establish inflation, particularly Starobinsky-like models, as a sensitive probe of generalized horizon thermodynamics and departures from standard MHR scaling.

gr-qc↗
arXiv2026

Improving the Sensitivity of Gravitational Wave Detection with Weighted Conformal Prediction

In the last decade, kilometre-scale interferometric gravitational-wave detectors have observed hundreds of compact binary mergers, the majority of which are binary black holes. However, the data are noise-dominated, and multiple independent search algorithms (pipelines) are used to enhance sensitivity and improve robustness. Rather than the standard approach of selecting the most significant pipeline output, we combine the outputs from all pipelines using a conformal prediction-based framework to provide statistically rigorous confidence estimates for candidate events. While combining pipelines improves sensitivity and ranking robustness, it requires a principled statistical framework that remains valid as data properties evolve across observing runs. A key challenge is distribution shifts between simulated datasets used for training and calibration and the real, unlabelled, observations used for testing, which can invalidate coverage guarantees and bias confidence estimates. In this work, we address this challenge by incorporating likelihood-ratio reweighting into our conformal prediction framework to account for covariate shift. Using mock datasets containing simulated signals, we demonstrate that weighted conformal prediction restores well-calibrated coverage under covariate shift and increases the confidence of events near the detection threshold, recovering true signals that would otherwise be missed.

gr-qc↗