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

authored by: The LIGO Scientific Collaboration , J. Abadie, B. P. Abbott, R. Abbott, M. Abernathy, T. Accadia, F. Acernese, C. Adams, R. Adhikari, P. Ajith, B. Allen, G. S. Allen, E. Amador Ceron, R. S. Amin, S. B. Anderson, W. G. Anderson, F. Antonucci, M. A. Arain, M. C. Araya, M. Aronsson, Y. Aso, S. M. Aston, P. Astone, D. Atkinson, P. Aufmuth, C. Aulbert, S. Babak, P. Baker, G. Ballardin, T. Ballinger, S. Ballmer, D. Barker, S. Barnum, F. Barone, B. Barr, P. Barriga, L. Barsotti, M. Barsuglia, M. A. Barton, I. Bartos, R. Bassiri, O. Burmeister, K. Danzmann, M. Hewitson, F. Kawazoe, H. Kim, H. Lück, H. Vahlbruch, A. Wanner, B. Willke, K. Yamamoto, Jörg Bauchrowitz, A. Bertolini, Oliver Bock, Michael Born, J. Breyer, Marc Brinkmann, Michael Britzger, Christian Dahl, J. Degallaix, I. Di Palma, Tobias Eberle, Henning Fehrmann, Maik Frede, D. Friedrich, S. Giampanis, S. Goßler, C. Graef, Hartmut Grote, B. Hage, A. Khalaidovski, Volker Kringel, G. Kuehn, P. Kwee, Nico Lastzka, J. Leong, B. Machenschalk, Moritz Mehmet, T. Meier, Chris Messenger, K. Mossavi, M. Pareja, M. Pickenpack, H. J. Pletsch, M. Prijatelj, Reinhard Prix, O. Puncken, C. Röver, Albrecht Rüdiger, F. Salemi, R. Schilling, R. Schnabel, Bastian Schulz, Sebastian Steinlechner, Sergey P. Tarabrin, John R. Taylor, André Thüring, C. Veltkamp, Michael Weinert, Peter Weßels, Tobias Westphal, L. Winkelmann, W. Winkler
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_ȯ and total masses of 25-100M_ȯ. 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_ȯ≤m₁, m ₂≤28M_ȯ binary black-hole systems with negligible spin to be no more than 2.0Mpc^-3Myr^-1 at 90% confidence.
Organisation(s): Institute of Gravitation Physics
Institute of Quantum Optics
QUEST-Leibniz Research School
External Organisation(s): California Institute of Caltech (Caltech)
Universite de Savoie
Monte S. Angelo University Federico II
Universita di Salerno
Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute)
University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
Stanford University
Louisiana State University
University of Florida
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Montana State University
Carleton College
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
University of Western Australia
Observatoire de Paris (OBSPARIS)
Columbia University
University of Glasgow
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN)
University of Birmingham
European Gravitational Observatory (EGO)
Type: Article
Journal: Physical Review D - Particles, Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology
Volume: 83
ISSN: 1550-7998
Publication date: 06.06.2011
Publication status: Published
Peer reviewed: Yes
ASJC Scopus subject areas: Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous)
Electronic version(s): https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.83.122005 (Access: Open)