Impact of higher harmonics in searching for gravitational waves from nonspinning binary black holes

Current searches for gravitational waves from coalescing binary black holes (BBH) use templates that only include the dominant harmonic. In this study we use effective-one-body multipolar waveforms calibrated to numerical-relativity simulations to quantify the effect of neglecting subdominant harmonics on the sensitivity of searches. We consider both signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the signal-based vetoes that are used to reweight SNR. We find that neglecting subdominant modes when searching for nonspinning BBHs with component masses 3 M-circle dot <= m(1), m(2) <= 200 M-circle dot and total mass M < 360 M-circle dot in advanced LIGO results in a negligible reduction of the reweighted SNR at detection thresholds. Subdominant modes therefore have no effect on the detection rates predicted for advanced LIGO. Furthermore, we find that if subdominant modes are included in templates the sensitivity of the search becomes worse if we use current search priors, due to an increase in false alarm probability. Templates would need to be weighted differently than what is currently done to compensate for the increase in false alarms. If we split the template bank such that subdominant modes are only used when M greater than or similar to 100 M-circle dot and mass ratio q greater than or similar to 4, we find that the sensitivity does improve for these intermediate mass-ratio BBHs, but the sensitive volume associated with these systems is still small compared to equal-mass systems. Using subdominant modes is therefore unlikely to substantially increase the probability of detecting gravitational waves from nonspinning BBH signals unless there is a relatively large population of intermediate mass-ratio BBHs in the universe.