Searching for gravitational-wave signals from precessing black hole binaries with the GstLAL pipeline

Abstract

Precession in binary black holes (BBH) is caused by the failure of the black hole spins to be aligned and its study can open up new perspectives in gravitational wave astronomy, providing, among other advancements, a precise measure of distance and an accurate characterization of the BBH spins. However, detecting precessing signals is a highly nontrivial task, as standard matched filtering pipelines for gravitational wave searches are built on many assumptions that do not hold in the precessing case. This work details the upgrades made to the GstLAL pipeline to facilitate the search for precessing BBH signals. The implemented changes in the search statistics and in the signal consistency test are then described in detail. The performance of the upgraded pipeline is evaluated through two extensive searches of precessing signals, targeting two different regions in the mass space, and the consistency of the results is examined. Additionally, the benefits of the upgrades are assessed by comparing the sensitive volume of the precessing searches with two corresponding traditional aligned-spin searches. While no significant sensitivity improvement is observed for precessing binaries with mass ratio q≲6, a volume increase of up to 100% is attainable for heavily asymmetric systems with largely misaligned spins. Furthermore, our findings suggest that the primary cause of degraded performance in an aligned-spin search targeting precessing signals is not a poor signal-to-noise-ratio recovery but rather the failure of the ζ2 signal-consistency test. Our work paves the way for a large-scale search for precessing signals, which could potentially result in exciting future detections.