A new efficient approach to searching for gravitational waves with higher-order harmonics.

Most current gravitational wave (GW) search pipelines only include (2,2) mode of GW radiation in the template waveforms. However, templates including higher GW harmonics, e.g., (3,3) or (4,4), can be important for detecting high-mass and asymmetric mass-ratios systems. Searching with templates including higher GW harmonics is challenging because the extra degrees of freedom can cause: (i) the size of the template bank (and the cost of search) to increase substantially, and (ii) loss of sensitivity of the search (as the number of background triggers increase). In this talk, I will show a new efficient method to include higher modes into search pipelines which overcomes these two challenges. Towards the end, I change gears and discuss some new methods to down-weight noise transients ("glitches") and improve the search sensitivity to high-mass binary black hole mergers.