Search for gravitational waves from binary black hole inspiral, merger, and ringdown

Abstract

We present the first modeled search for gravitational waves using the complete binary black-hole gravitational waveform from inspiral through the merger and ringdown for binaries with negligible component spin. We searched approximately 2 years of LIGO data, taken between November 2005 and September 2007, for systems with component masses of 1-99M(circle dot) and total masses of 25-100M(circle dot). We did not detect any plausible gravitational-wave signals but we do place upper limits on the merger rate of binary black holes as a function of the component masses in this range. We constrain the rate of mergers for 19M(circle dot) <= m(1), m(2) <= 28M(circle dot) binary black-hole systems with negligible spin to be no more than 2.0 Mpc(-3) Myr(-1) at 90% confidence

Fast Prediction and Evaluation of Gravitational Waveforms Using Surrogate Models

“…For a sampling rate of 2 11 ¼ 2;048 Hz, which is a typical rate used in the S5 and S6 searches for gravitational waves by the LIGO-VIRGO-GEO600 Collaboration [27,55], the speedup is ≈2; 300, as shown in the bottom panel of Fig. 10.…”

“…The horizontal dashed lines show the maximum errors for the empirical node for which Eqs. (26) and (27) are smallest, which occurs for the second empirical time T 2 ¼ −2; 367M. These errors are of order 10 −5 .…”

“…Figure 8 shows the maximum of the pointwise differences from Eqs. (26) and (27) for the relative amplitude (circles) and phases (crosses), respectively, evaluated at each empirical time. We see that the amplitudes are accurate to better than 10 −5 for the entire inspiral phase until the merger regime, where the error increases to about 10 −3 after which it plateaus throughout the ringdown stage.…”

“…8 shows the maximum of the pointwise differencesfromEqs. (26)and (27)usingthesepost-Newtonianinspired fitting functions. These fitting functions have a least squares fitting error comparable to the polynomial errors shown in the top panel.…”

“…To help alleviate this computational bottleneck, models of the inspiral, merger, and ringdown phases of a binary black hole (BBH) coalescence have been developed over the last decade [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]. The purpose of these phenomenological models is to provide a sufficiently accurate representation of a BBH waveform within some range of parameters by fitting certain coefficients and functions to a set of waveforms extracted from numerical simulations.…”