Quasiphysical family of gravity-wave templates for precessing binaries of spinning compact objects: Application to double-spin precessing binaries

The gravitational waveforms emitted during the adiabatic inspiral of precessing binaries with two spinning compact bodies of comparable masses, evaluated within the post-Newtonian approximation, can be reproduced rather accurately by the waveforms obtained by setting one of the two spins to zero, at least for the purpose of detection by ground-based gravitational-wave interferometers. Here we propose to use this quasiphysical family of single-spin templates to search for the signals emitted by double-spin precessing binaries, and we find that its signal-matching performance is satisfactory for source masses (m₁,m₂)∈[3,15]M_⊙×[3,15]M_⊙. For this mass range, using the LIGO-I design sensitivity, we estimate that the number of templates required to yield a minimum match of 0.97 is ∼320 000. We discuss also the accuracy to which the single-spin template family can be used to estimate the parameters of the original double-spin precessing binaries.