  The coalescence of a stellar-mass compact object into an intermediate-mass
black hole (intermediate mass-ratio coalescence; IMRAC) is an important
astrophysical source for ground-based gravitational-wave interferometers in the
so-called advanced configuration. However, the ability to carry out effective
matched-filter based searches for these systems is limited by the lack of
reliable waveforms. Here we consider binaries in which the intermediate-mass
black hole has mass in the range 24 - 200 solar masses with a stellar-mass
companion having masses in the range 1.4 - 18.5 solar masses. In addition, we
constrain the mass ratios, q, of the binaries to be in the range 1/140 < q <
1/10 and we restrict our study to the case of circular binaries with
non-spinning components. We investigate the relative contribution to the
signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the three different phases of the coalescence:
inspiral, merger and ringdown. We show that merger and ringdown contribute to a
substantial fraction of the total SNR over a large portion of the mass
parameter space, although in a limited portion the SNR is dominated by the
inspiral phase. We further identify three regions in the IMRAC mass-space in
which: (i) inspiral-only searches could be performed with losses in detection
rates L in the range 10% < L < 27%, (ii) searches based on inspiral-only
templates lead to a loss in detection rates in the range 27% < L < 50%$, and
(iii) templates that include merger and ringdown are essential to prevent
losses in detection rates greater than 50%. We investigate the effectiveness
with which the inspiral-only portion of the IMRAC waveform space is covered by
comparing several existing waveform families in this regime. Our results
reinforce the importance of extensive numerical relativity simulations of
IMRACs and the need for further studies of suitable approximation schemes in
this mass range.
