Impact of gravitational radiation higher order modes on single aligned-spin gravitational wave searches for binary black holes

Current template-based gravitational wave searches for compact binary coalescences use waveform models that omit the higher order modes content of the gravitational radiation emitted, considering only the quadrupolar $(\ensuremath{\ell},|m|)=(2,2)$ modes. We study the effect of such omission for the case of aligned-spin compact binary coalescence searches for equal-spin (and nonspinning) binary black holes in the context of two versions of Advanced LIGO: the upcoming 2015 version, known as early Advanced LIGO (eaLIGO) and its zero-detuned high-energy power version, which we will refer to as Advanced LIGO (AdvLIGO). In addition, we study the case of a nonspinning search for initial LIGO (iLIGO). We do this via computing the effectualness of the aligned-spin SEOBNRv1 reduced order model waveform family, which only considers quadrupolar modes, toward hybrid post-Newtonian/numerical relativity waveforms which contain higher order modes. We find that for all LIGO versions losses of more than 10% of events occur in the case of AdvLIGO for mass ratio $q\ensuremath{\ge}6$ and total mass $M\ensuremath{\ge}100{M}_{\ensuremath{\bigodot}}$ due to the omission of higher modes, this region of the parameter space being larger for eaLIGO and iLIGO. Moreover, while the maximum event loss observed over the explored parameter space for AdvLIGO is of 15% of events, for iLIGO and eaLIGO, this increases up to (39,23)%. We find that omission of higher modes leads to observation-averaged systematic parameter biases toward lower spin, total mass, and chirp mass. For completeness, we perform a preliminar, nonexhaustive comparison of systematic biases to statistical errors. We find that, for a given signal-to-noise ratio, systematic biases dominate over statistical errors at much lower total mass for eaLIGO than for AdvLIGO.