Gravitational waves from black hole binary inspiral and merger: The span of third post-Newtonian effective-one-body templates

We extend the description of gravitational waves emitted by binary black holes during the final stages of inspiral and merger by introducing in the third post-Newtonian (3PN) effective-one-body (EOB) templates seven new "flexibility" parameters that affect the two-body dynamics and gravitational radiation emission. The plausible ranges of these flexibility parameters, notably the parameter characterizing the fourth post-Newtonian effects in the dynamics, are estimated. Using these estimates, we show that the currently available standard 3PN bank of EOB templates does "span" the space of signals opened up by all the flexibility parameters, in that their maximized mutual overlaps are larger than 96.5%. This confirms the effectualness of 3PN EOB templates for the detection of binary black holes in gravitational-wave data from interferometric detectors. The possibility to drastically reduce the number of EOB templates using a few "universal" phasing functions is suggested.