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The sensitivity of gravitational wave searches for binary black holes isestimated via the injection and posterior recovery of simulated gravitationalwave signals in the detector data streams. When a search reports no detections,the estimated sensitivity is then used to place upper limits on the coalescencerate of the target source. In order to obtain correct sensitivity and rateestimates, the injected waveforms must be faithful representations of the realsignals. Up to date, however, injected waveforms have neglected radiation modesof order higher than the quadrupole, potentially biasing sensitivity andcoalescence rate estimates. In particular, higher-order modes are known to havea large impact in the gravitational waves emitted by intermediate mass blackholes binaries. In this work we evaluate the impact of this approximation inthe context of two search algorithms run by the LIGO Scientific Collaborationin their search for intermediate mass black hole binaries in the O1 LIGOScience Run data: a matched-filter based pipeline and a coherent un-modeledone. To this end we estimate the sensitivity of both searches to simulatedsignals including and omitting higher-order modes. We find that omission ofhigher-order modes leads to biases in the sensitivity estimates which depend onthe masses of the binary, the search algorithm and the required level ofsignificance for detection. In addition, we compare the sensitivity of the twosearch algorithms across the studied parameter space. We conclude that the mostrecent LIGO-Virgo upper limits on the rate of coalescence of intermediate massblack hole binaries are conservative for the case of highly asymmetricbinaries. However, the tightest upper limits, placed for nearly-equal-masssources, remain unchanged due to the small contribution of higher modes to thecorresponding sources.

Sensitivity of gravitational wave searches to the full signal of intermediate mass black hole binaries during the LIGO O1 Science Run