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Searching for Gravitational Waves from Compact Binaries with Precessing Spins

10 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

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abstract

Current searches for gravitational waves from compact-object binaries with the LIGO and Virgo observatories employ waveform models with spins aligned (or anti-aligned) with the orbital angular momentum. Here, we derive a new statistic to search for compact objects carrying generic (precessing) spins. Applying this statistic, we construct banks of both aligned- and generic-spin templates for binary black holes and neutron-star--black-hole binaries, and compare the effectualness of these banks towards simulated populations of generic-spin systems. We then use these banks in a pipeline analysis of Gaussian noise to measure the increase in background incurred by using generic- instead of aligned-spin banks. Although the generic-spin banks have a factor of ten to twenty more templates than the aligned-spin banks, we find an overall improvement in signal recovery at fixed false-alarm rate for systems with high-mass ratio and highly precessing spins ---up to 60\% for neutron-star--black-hole mergers. This gain in sensitivity comes at a small loss of sensitivity ($\lesssim$4\%) for systems that are already well-covered by aligned-spin templates. Since the observation of even a single binary merger with misalinged spins could provide unique astrophysical insights into the formation of these sources, we recommend that the method described here be developed further to mount a viable search for generic-spin binary mergers in LIGO/Virgo data.

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background 2 method 1

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years

2026 6 2025 4

representative citing papers

Testing General Relativity with GWTC-4.0 through mixture models

gr-qc · 2026-07-08 · conditional · novelty 6.0

A mixture-model framework for combining gravitational-wave tests of General Relativity yields Bayes factors of 10-20 favoring GR, substantially lower than existing methods that assume uniform deviations across events.

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