Performance of Newtonian filters in the detection of gravitational radiation from coalescing binaries

Abstract

Post – Newtonian corrections to the gravitational waveform emitted by coalescing binaries have been found to lead to a secular phase accumulation error as compared with the signals calculated in the Newtonian approximation. The matched filtering process which relies on the correlation between the correlation between the signal and the filter is extremely sensitive to errors in phase. We explore the possibility of compensating for the phase difference caused by the post-Newtonian terms by allowing for a shift in the Newtonian filter parameters. We find that, on the average, we lose by about 30% in the correlation.