Are post-Newtonian templates faithful and effectual in detecting gravitational signals from neutron star binaries?

We compute the overlap function between post-Newtonian (PN) templates and gravitational signals emitted by binary systems composed of one neutron star and one point mass, obtained by a perturbative approach. The calculations are performed for different stellar models and for different detectors, to estimate how effectual and faithful the PN templates are, and to establish whether effects related to the internal structure of neutron stars may possibly be extracted by the matched filtering technique. © 2002 The American Physical Society.