Ben Farr edited Mass estimates.tex  over 9 years ago

Commit id: 69a37381b5a16505dc6ec2e3e86f74d56718226d

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For the sake of sampling efficiency, it is common to reparameterize the model to reduce the degeneracy between parameters, particularly those specifing the binary's masses. GW detectors are most sensitive to a combination of component masses referred to as the chirp mass, $\mathcal{M}_\mathrm{c} = (m_1 m_2)^{3/5} (m_1 + m_2)^{-1/5}$. For this study, we use the assymetric mass ratio $q = m_2/m_1$, where $0 < q < 1$, as the second mass parameter. Detectors are much less sensitive to the mass ratio, and strong degeneracies with spin make constraints on $q$ even worse. It is primarily the uncertainty in $q$ that governs the uncertainty in component masses $m_1$ and $m_2$.  Figure  \ref{fig:mass_std} shows the distribution of mass standard deviations for the 250 simulated signals using three different analyses: non-spinning analyses using the frequency-domain ``TaylorF2'' model and the time-domain ``SpinTaylorT4'' model with spins fixed to 0, and a fully spinning ``SpinTaylorT4'' analysis.