  Gravitational waves from coalescing compact binaries are one of the most
promising sources for detectors such as LIGO, Virgo and GEO600. If the
components of the binary posess significant angular momentum (spin), as is
likely to be the case if one component is a black hole, spin-induced precession
of a binary's orbital plane causes modulation of the gravitational-wave
amplitude and phase. If the templates used in a matched-filter search do not
accurately model these effects then the sensitivity, and hence the detection
rate, will be reduced. We investigate the ability of several search pipelines
to detect gravitational waves from compact binaries with spin. We use the
post-Newtonian approximation to model the inspiral phase of the signal and
construct two new template banks using the phenomenological waveforms of
Buonanno, Chen and Vallisneri. We compare the performance of these template
banks to that of banks constructed using the stationary phase approximation to
the non-spinning post-Newtonian inspiral waveform currently used by LIGO and
Virgo in the search for compact binary coalescence. We find that, at the same
false alarm rate, a search pipeline using phenomenological templates is no more
effective than a pipeline which uses non-spinning templates. We recommend the
continued use of the non-spinning stationary phase template bank until the
false alarm rate associated with templates which include spin effects can be
substantially reduced.
