A search technique to observe precessing compact binary mergers in the advanced detector era - Data Release

This is the data release for the paper “A search technique to observe precessing compact binary mergers in the advanced detector era”, which can be found here. We release the data behind each of the figures and the code and configuration files that were used to produce each of them. We also demonstrate the steps needed to reproduce our precessing search using our code.

As always with the python landscape, software dependencies will change in the coming years, and this code may be incompatible with future releases of any dependency. This analysis was generated using PyCBC as of v2.0.6 and the dependencies etc. that can be found in the v2.0.6 PyCBC Docker image should be compatible with the branches of PyCBC and sbank that we used for this analysis.

This code can be run against the v2.0.6 PyCBC Docker image, which can be found here https://zenodo.org/record/7547919. The docker image provides a full suite of software and it should be possible to “just use this”, after installing the modified PyCBC and sbank branches described in the sections below.

Reproducing our figures

The code to generate our figures is available as an ipython notebook

Some of this will require inputs from the sections below.

Reproducing our analysis

In addition to our result plots and figures, we want readers to be able to fully reproduce our analysis. We note in advance that this analysis is computationally expensive. The search in particular ran over thousands of cores over a period of days. This isn’t something that’s going to run on a laptop!

Generating the template bank

The first step in our analysis is to generate a set of templates.

Determining the number of harmonics to use

Then we need to identify how many components are needed for each template.

Verifying the template bank

Then we run the PyCBC bank verification workflow to evaluate the performance of the template bank.

Running the search

Finally we run the PyCBC search workflow to assess sensitivity in real O3 data

Additional thoughts

Additionally, we share some of our thoughts during development, and some avenues that we considered promising, but did not make it into this paper.. We hope that this will be useful if developing this technique further and we would encourage such an interested reader to carefully look over these notes before starting out!

License and Citation

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

We encourage use of these data in derivative works. If you use the material provided here, please cite the paper using the reference:

@article{McIsaac:2023ijd,
    author = "McIsaac, Connor and Hoy, Charlie and Harry, Ian",
    title = "{A search technique to observe precessing compact binary mergers in the advanced detector era}",
    eprint = "2303.17364",
    archivePrefix = "arXiv",
    primaryClass = "gr-qc",
    reportNumber = "LIGO-P2300071",
    month = "3",
    year = "2023"
}