Inspiraling compact binaries have been identified as one of the most
promising sources of gravitational waves for interferometric detectors. Most of
these binaries are expected to have circularized by the time their
gravitational waves enter the instrument's frequency band. However, the
possibility that some of the binaries might still possess a significant
eccentricity is not excluded. We imagine a situation in which eccentric signals
are received by the detector but not explicitly searched for in the data
analysis, which uses exclusively circular waveforms as matched filters. We
ascertain the likelihood that these filters, though not optimal, will
nevertheless be successful at capturing the eccentric signals. We do this by
computing the loss in signal-to-noise ratio incurred when searching for
eccentric signals with those nonoptimal filters. We show that for a binary
system of a given total mass, this loss increases with increasing eccentricity.
We show also that for a given eccentricity, the loss decreases as the total
mass is increased.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, ReVTeX; minor changes made after referee's
comment
