Creating our template banks

This page describes how we created the template banks used in our paper, and how you can recreate them

Code base

We used a modified branch of sbank to generate our template banks. The code we used is here

https://github.com/spxiwh/sbank/tree/two_harm_approx

We will aim to merge these changes back into the main sbank branch, but this was the branch used when creating the banks used in the paper.

Aligned-spin template bank

To generate the aligned-spin template bank we need:

• The PSD file.
• The configuration file.
• The generation script.

Then all you have to do is run the generation script.

bash runme_aligned.sh

PLEASE NOTE: This script will run the bank generation through 50 iterations, each trying to add a batch of templates into the bank. When the bank converges each cycle will take increasingly long, and add fewer templates. We stop this process and assess the bank when we see that the process has converged.

Precessing template bank

Similar to the aligned-spin bank the precessing bank needs:

• The PSD file same as the aligned case.
• The configuration file.
• The generation script.

Then all you have to do is run the generation script.

bash runme_prec.sh

PLEASE NOTE: This script will run the bank generation through 50 iterations, each trying to add a batch of templates into the bank. It becomes increasingly challenging to run this as the bank size grows and the bank converges. We ran this until we got close to 400,000 templates and ran our assessment on this. It is possible to make the template bank larger, but not clear that this would help overall efficiency.

Both of these scripts create a pegasus workflow, and so you need a condor cluster, with pegasus binaries, to execute this. Please contact us if it is difficult to produce such a setup.

Our template banks

You can download the template banks we generated (with the next step, computing the number of harmonics, already ran on the precessing bank) here:

• Aligned-spin template bank.
• Precessing template bank.