Spin precession and the detestability of gravitational waves from inspiraling compact binaries

Inspiraling compact binaries are among the most promising candidate sources for the first detection of gravitational waves. If at least one of the compact objects is rapidly spinning, the general-relativistic spin-orbit and spin-spin coupling cause the binary's orbital plane to precess, producing a visible signature in the emitted gravitational waveforms. These signals are searched over in the data of gravitational-wave detectors using the technique of matched filtering, which involves cross correlating the data with a bank of theoretical templates. A full description of the waveforms requires the use of at least 8 parameters describing the masses and spins of the objects. But performing a search using this 8-parameter template family has a number of difficulties, including the increased false-alarm rate and prohibitive computational cost. In this talk, I propose a post-Newtonian template family described by the two mass parameters and a \textit{single} spin parameter (describing the dominant spin-orbit coupling effect), and demonstrate that the template family is ``effectual'' enough in detecting precessing binaries in the comparable-mass regime.