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

Creators: Abbott, B. P.; Abadie, J.; Abbott, R.; Adhikari, Rana X.; Ajith, P.; Anderson, S. B.; Araya, M. C.; Aronsson, M.; Aso, Y.; Ballmer, S.; Betzwieser, J.; Billingsley, G.; Black, E.; Blackburn, J. K.; Bork, R.; Boyle, M.; Brooks, A. F.; Cannon, K.; Cepeda, C.; Chalermsongsak, T.; Chen, Y.; Coyne, D. C.; Dannenberg, R.; Daubert, B.; Dergachev, V.; DeSalvo, R.; Drever, R. W. P.; Driggers, J. C.; Ehrens, P.; Engel, R.; Etzel, T.; Gustafson, E. K.; Hanna, C.; Harms, J.; Heefner, J.; Heptonstall, A. W.; Hodge, K. A.; Ivanov, A.; Kalmus, P.; Kells, W.; Keppel, D. G.; King, P. J.; Kondrashov, V.; Kozak, D.; Lazzarini, A.; Lindquist, P. E.; Luan, J.; Mageswaran, M.; Mailand, K.; Mak, C.; Maros, E.; Marx, J. N.; McIntyre, G.; Meshkov, S.; Mino, Y.; Mitra, S.; Nash, T.; Ogin, G. H.; Osthelder, C.; Patel, P.; Pedraza, M.; Robertson, N. A.; Sannibale, V.; Searle, A. C.; Seifert, F.; Sengupta, A. S.; Singer, A.; Smith, M. R.; Somiya, K.; Stochino, A.; Taylor, R.; Thorne, K. S.; Torrie, C. I.; Turner, L.; Vallisneri, M.; Vass, S.; Villar, A. E.; Wallace, L.; Ward, R. L.; Wen, L.; Whitcomb, S. E.; Willems, P. A.; Yamamoto, H.; Yeaton-Massey, D.; Zhang, L.; Weinstein, Alan J.; LIGO Scientific Collaboration; Virgo Collaboration

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_⊙ and total masses of 25–100M_⊙. 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_⊙ ≤ m_1, m_2 ≤ 28M_⊙ binary black-hole systems with negligible spin to be no more than 2.0 Mpc^(-3) Myr^(-1) at 90% confidence.

Additional Information

© 2011 American Physical Society. Received 8 March 2011; published 6 June 2011. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the United States National Science Foundation for the construction and operation of the LIGO Laboratory, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Max-Planck-Society, and the State of Niedersachsen/Germany for support of the construction and operation of the GEO600 detector, and the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare and the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique for the construction and operation of the Virgo detector. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the support of the research by these agencies and by the Australian Research Council, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research of India, the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare of Italy, the Spanish Ministerio de Educaciόn y Ciencia, the Conselleria d'Economia Hisenda i Innovaciό of the Govern de les Illes Balears, the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, the FOCUS Programme of Foundation for Polish Science, the Royal Society, the Scottish Funding Council, the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance, The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Carnegie Trust, the Leverhulme Trust, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Research Corporation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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