Chaos and gravitational waves

The gravitational waveforms of a chaotic system will exhibit a sensitive dependence on initial conditions. The waveforms of nearby orbits decohere on a time scale fixed by the largest Lyapunov exponent of the orbit. The loss of coherence has important observational consequences for systems where the Lyapunov time scale is short compared to the chirp time scale. Detectors that rely on matched filtering techniques will be unable to detect gravitational waves from these systems.