Building a stochastic template bank for detecting massive black hole binaries

The coalescence of pairs of massive black holes are the strongest and most promising sources for LISA. In fact, the gravitational wave signal from the final inspiral and merger will be detectable throughout the universe. In this paper we describe the first step in a two-step hierarchical search for the gravitational wave signal from inspiraling massive BH binaries. It is based on a method routinely used in ground-based gravitational wave astronomy, namely filtering the data through a bank of templates. However we use a novel, Monte Carlo based (stochastic), method for laying a grid in the parameter space, and we use the likelihood maximized analytically over some parameters, known as the F-statistic, as a detection statistic. We build a coarse template bank to detect gravitational wave signals and to make preliminary parameter estimation. The best candidates will be followed up using a Metropolis–Hasting stochastic search to refine the parameter estimates. We demonstrate the performance of the method by applying it to the Mock LISA data challenge 1B (training data set). PACS numbers: 04.30.Db, 04.80.Nn (Some figures in this article are in colour only in the electronic version)