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 $\sim 1.33$ M${}_{\odot }$. 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 optimally reduced template bank is expected to detect $14\mathrm{\%}$ ($61\mathrm{\%}$) 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 similar sensitivity increase to that due to the reduced template bank.