Significant increase in sensitive volume of a gravitational wave search upon including higher harmonics

Understand

Most gravitational wave searches to date have included only the quadrupole mode in their search templates.

• Here, we demonstrate that incorporating higher harmonics improves the search sensitive volume for detecting binary black hole mergers, challenging the conclusion of previous studies.
• Using the $\tt{IAS-HM}$ detection pipeline, and the simulated (injection) signals from the LIGO-Virgo-Kagra (LVK) collaboration, we quantify the improvement in sensitivity due to the inclusion of higher harmonics.
• This improvement is significant for systems with higher mass ratios and larger total masses, with gains in sensitivity even exceeding $100\%$ at certain high masses.