Search for gravitational wave ringdowns from perturbed intermediate mass black holes in LIGO-Virgo data from 2005–2010

Abstract

We report results from a search for gravitational waves produced by perturbed intermediate mass black holes (IMBH) in data collected by LIGO and Virgo between 2005 and 2010. The search was sensitive to astrophysical sources that produced damped sinusoid gravitational wave signals, also known as ringdowns, with frequency 50 ≤ f 0 =Hz ≤ 2000 and decay timescale 0.0001 ≲ τ=s ≲ 0.1 characteristic of those produced in mergers of IMBH pairs. No significant gravitational wave candidate was detected. We report upper limits on the astrophysical coalescence rates of IMBHs with total binary mass 50 ≤ M=M ⊙ ≤ 450 and component mass ratios of either 1:1 or 4:1. For systems with total mass 100 ≤ M=M ⊙ ≤ 150, we report a 90% confidence upper limit on the rate of binary IMBH mergers with nonspinning and equal mass components of 6.9 × 10 −8 Mpc −3 yr −1 . We also report a rate upper limit for ringdown waveforms from perturbed IMBHs, radiating 1% of their mass as gravitational waves in the fundamental, l ¼ m ¼ 2, oscillation mode, that is nearly three orders of magnitude more stringent than previous results.

Prospects for intermediate mass black hole binary searches with advanced gravitational-wave detectors

“…The result is about 4 orders of magnitude lower than the upper limits set on previous LIGO-Virgo data [25,30,31] and is comparable to the theoretical estimates in [34]. Finally, it is more than 1 order of magnitude lower than 0.1 GC −1 Gyr −1 , the IMBHB coalescence-rate density corresponding to one event occurring in each GC within the lifetime of the cluster (assumed equal to 10 Gyr).…”

“…Relative to the previous LIGO-Virgo observatories, the advanced detectors target a significant sensitivity improvement over the whole bandwidth (about 1 order of magnitude in the most sensitive band, around ∼200 Hz), together with an extension of the viable low-frequency band. The improvement at low frequencies will be particularly relevant for IMBHB searches, as it will extend the upper end of the binary total-mass spectrum beyond that accessible with past GW interferometers [20,25,30,31].…”

“…Most of the searches have been performed with analysis methods based on matched filtering [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]. This approach requires the generation of potentially large filter banks covering the investigated parameter space [26][27][28].…”

The Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole: How Good a Case Is It?

“…the case of IRS13E Maillard et al, 2004;Schödel et al, 2005;Fritz et al, 2010), their interaction with SgrA* may produce a sufficiently strong signal if a merger event occurs. However, the likelihood for this is rather low (Aasi et al, 2014).…”

GW150914: First results from the search for binary black hole coalescence with Advanced LIGO

“…The PyCBC analysis [3][4][5] uses fundamentally the same methods [12,15,[62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72] as those used to search for gravitational waves from compact binaries in the initial LIGO and Virgo detector era [73][74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84], with the improvements described in Refs. [3,4].…”