Searching for Asymmetric and Heavily Precessing Binary Black Holes in the Gravitational Wave Data from the LIGO Third Observing Run

Creators: Schmidt, Stefano¹; Caudill, Sarah²; Creighton, Jolien D. E.³; Tsukada, Leo⁴; Doke, Anushka²; Jain, Manvi²; Ray, Anarya³; Adhicary, Shomik⁴; Baral, Pratyusava³; Baylor, Amanda³; Cannon, Kipp⁵; Cousins, Bryce⁴; Ewing, Becca⁴; Fong, Heather⁵; George, Richard N.⁶; Godwin, Patrick^{4, 7}; Hanna, Chad⁴; Harada, Reiko⁵; Huang, Yun-Jing⁴; Huxford, Rachael⁴; Joshi, Prathamesh⁴; Kennington, James⁴; Kuwahara, Soichiro⁵; Li, Alvin K. Y.⁷; Magee, Ryan⁷; Meacher, Duncan³; Messick, Cody; Morisaki, Soichiro³; Mukherjee, Debnandini⁸; Niu, Wanting⁴; Pace, Alex⁴; Posnansky, Cort⁴; Sachdev, Surabhi³; Sakon, Shio⁴; Singh, Divya⁴; Shah, Urja⁹; Tapia, Ron⁴; Tsutsui, Takuya⁵; Ueno, Koh⁵; Viets, Aaron¹⁰; Wade, Leslie¹¹; Wade, Madeline¹¹

1. National Institute for Subatomic Physics
2. University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
3. University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
4. Pennsylvania State University
5. University of Tokyo
6. The University of Texas at Austin
7. California Institute of Technology
8. Marshall Space Flight Center
9. Georgia Institute of Technology
10. Concordia University Wisconsin
11. Kenyon College

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Abstract

Leveraging the features of the GstLAL pipeline, we present the results of a matched filtering search for asymmetric binary black hole systems with heavily misaligned spins in LIGO and Virgo data taken during the third observing run. Our target systems show strong imprints of precession whereas current searches have nonoptimal sensitivity in detecting them. After measuring the sensitivity improvement brought by our search over standard spin-aligned searches, we report the detection of 30 gravitational wave events already discovered in the latest version of the Gravitational Wave Transient Catalog. However, we do not find any additional significant gravitational wave candidates. Our results allow us to place an upper limit of 𝑅90%=0.2⁢8+0.33−0.04 Gpc−3 yr−1 on the merger rate of a hypothetical subpopulation of asymmetric, heavily precessing signals, not identified by other searches. Since our upper limit is consistent with the latest rate estimates from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration, our findings rule out the existence of a yet-to-be-discovered population of precessing binaries.

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Acknowledgement

S. Schmidt is supported by the research program of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). S. C. is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. PHY-2309332. The authors are grateful for computational resources provided by the LIGO Laboratory and supported by National Science Foundation Grants No. PHY-0757058 and No. PHY-0823459. This material is based upon work supported by NSF’s LIGO Laboratory which is a major facility fully funded by the National Science Foundation. LIGO was constructed by the California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and operates under cooperative Agreement No. PHY-1764464. The authors are grateful for computational resources provided by the Pennsylvania State University’s Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) and the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Nemo and support by NSF Grants No. PHY-2011865, No. NSF OAC-2103662, No. NSF PHY-1626190, No. NSF PHY-1700765, No. NSF PHY-2207728, No. NSF PHY-2207594, and No. PHY-2309332 as well as by the research program of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). LIGO Laboratory and Advanced LIGO are funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) as well as the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) of the UK, the Max-Planck-Society (MPS), and the State of Niedersachsen/Germany for support of the construction of Advanced LIGO and construction and operation of the GEO600 detector. Additional support for Advanced LIGO was provided by the Australian Research Council. Virgo is funded, through the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO), by the French Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and the Dutch Nikhef, with contributions by institutions from Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Monaco, Poland, Portugal, Spain. KAGRA is supported by Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) in Japan; National Research Foundation (NRF) and Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) in Korea; Academia Sinica (AS) and National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) in Taiwan.

Additional Information

This Letter carries LIGO Document No. LIGO-P2400044.

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PhysRevLett.133.201401.pdf

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