Beyond the Horizon Distance: LIGO-Virgo can Boost Gravitational-Wave Detection Rates by Exploiting the Mass Distribution of Neutron Stars.

The masses of neutron stars in neutron star binaries are observed to fall in a narrow mass range around ∼1.33M_{⊙}. We explore the advantage of focusing on this region of the parameter space in gravitational-wave searches. We find that an all-sky (externally triggered) search with an optimally reduced template bank is expected to detect 14% (61%) more binary mergers than without the reduction. A reduced template bank can also represent significant improvement in technical cost. We also develop a more detailed search method using binary mass distribution, and find a sensitivity increase similar to that due to the reduced template bank.