A search for intermediate-mass black holes mergers in the second LIGO--Virgo observing run with the Bayes Coherence Ratio

Abstract

The detection of an intermediate-mass black hole population (10 2 − 10 6 M ) will provide clues to their formation environments (e.g., disks of active galactic nuclei, globular clusters) and illuminate a potential pathway to produce supermassive black holes. Ground-based gravitational-wave detectors are sensitive to a subset of such mergers and have been used to detect one 142 +28 −16 M intermediate-mass black hole formation event. However, ground-based detector data contain numerous incoherent short duration noise transients that can mimic the gravitational-wave signals from merging intermediate-mass black holes, limiting the sensitivity of searches. Here we search for binary black hole mergers using a Bayesian-inspired ranking statistic which measures the coherence or incoherence of triggers in multiple-detector data. We use this statistic to identify candidate events with lab-frame total masses 55 M using data from LIGO's second observing run. Our analysis does not yield evidence for new intermediate-mass black holes. However, we find support for some stellar-mass binary black holes not reported in the first LIGO-Virgo gravitational-wave transient catalog, GWTC-1.

Accurate modeling and mitigation of overlapping signals and glitches in gravitational-wave data

“…The effect of PSD uncertainty in CBC analyses has also been explored in[63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71].…”

Accurate modeling and mitigation of overlapping signals and glitches in gravitational-wave data

“…The number of wavelets and hence the model dimensionality is not fixed and wavelets can be added or subtracted as needed. Each wavelet is described by 5 parameters (θ glitch :) 1 The effect of PSD uncertainty in CBC analyses has also been explored in [59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67].…”