A binary tree approach to template placement for searches for gravitational waves from compact binary mergers

Understand

We demonstrate a new geometric method for fast template placement for searches for gravitational waves from the inspiral, merger and ringdown of compact binaries.

• The method is based on a binary tree decomposition of the template bank parameter space into non-overlapping hypercubes.
• We use a numerical approximation of the signal overlap metric at the center of each hypercube to estimate the number of templates required to cover the hypercube and determine whether to further split the hypercube.
• As long as the expected number of templates in a given cube is greater than a given threshold, we split the cube along its longest edge according to the metric.