Gravitational wave chirp search: Economization of post-Newtonian matched filter bank via cardinal interpolation

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 likely to observe. Gravitational radiation emitted during this phase will have to be dug out of noise by matched-filtering (correlating) the detector output with a bank of several 10⁵ templates, making the computational resources required quite demanding, though not formidable. We propose an interpolation 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 ∼4 smaller than required by the usual approach, when the minimal overlap between the template bank and an arbitrary signal (the so-called minimal match) is 0.97. The method is amenable to easy implementation, and the various detector projects might benefit by adopting it to reduce the computational costs of inspiraling neutron star and black hole binary searches.