Gravitational waves from eccentric compact binaries: Reduction in signal-to-noise ratio due to nonoptimal signal processing - art. no. 124008

Inspiraling compact binaries have been identified as one of the most promis ing sources of gravitational waves for interferometric detectors. Most of t hese binaries are expected to have circularized by the time their gravitati onal waves enter the instrument's frequency band. However, the possibility that some of the binaries might still possess a significant eccentricity is not excluded. We imagine a situation in which eccentric signals are receiv ed by the detector but not explicitly searched for in the data analysis, wh ich uses exclusively circular waveforms as matched filters. We ascertain th e likelihood that these filters, though not optimal, will nevertheless be s uccessful at capturing the eccentric signals. We do this by computing the l oss in signal-to-noise ratio incurred when searching for eccentric signals with those nonoptimal filters. We show that for a binary system of a given total mass, this loss increases with increasing eccentricity. We show also that, for a given eccentricity, the loss decreases as the total mras a is i ncreased. [S0556-2821(99)01224-2].