Gravitational wave chirp search: Economization of post-Newtonian matched filter bank via cardinal interpolation - art. no. 121101

The final inspiral phase in the evolution of a compact binary consisting of black holes and/or neutron stars is among the most probable events that a network of ground-based interferometric gravitational wave detectors is lik ely to observe. Gravitational radiation emitted during this phase will have to be dug out of noise by matched-filtering (correlating) the detector out put with a bank of several 10(5) templates, making the computational resour ces required quite demanding, though not formidable. We propose an interpol ation method for evaluating the correlation between template waveforms and the detector output, and show that the method is effective in substantially reducing the number of templates required. Indeed, the number of templates needed could be a factor of similar to4 smaller than required by the usual approach, when the minimal overlap between the template bank and an arbitr ary signal (the so-called minimal match) is 0.97. The method is amenable to easy implementation, and the various detector projects might benefit by ad opting it to reduce the computational costs of inspiraling neutron star and black hole binary searches.