Search for gravitational waves from high-mass-ratio compact-binary mergers of stellar mass and sub-solar mass black holes.

Alexander H. Nitz^{1, 2}, Yi-Fan Wang^{1, 2}

<sub>1. Albert-Einstein-Institut, Max-Planck-Institut for Gravitationsphysik, D-30167 Hannover, Germany
2. Leibniz Universitat Hannover, D-30167 Hannover, Germany</sub>

Introduction

We present the first search for gravitational waves from the coalescence of stellar mass and subsolar mass black holes with masses between 20 - 100 Msun and 0.01 - 1 Msun(10−10^3 MJ ), respectively. The observation of a single sub-solar mass black hole would establish the existence of primordial black holes and a possible component of dark matter. We search the ∼ 164 days of public LIGO data from 2015-2017 when LIGO-Hanford and LIGO-Livingston were simultaneously observing. We find no significant candidate gravitational-wave signals. Using this non-detection, we place a 90% upper limit on the rate of 30 − 0.01 Msun and 30 − 0.1 Msun mergers at < 1.2 × 10^6 and < 1.6 × 10^4 Gpc^−3 yr^−1, respectively. If we consider binary formation through direct gravitationalwave braking, this kind of merger would be exceedingly rare if only the lighter black hole were primordial in origin (< 10^−4 Gpc^−3 yr^−1). If both black holes are primordial in origin, we constrain the contribution of 1(0.1) Msun black holes to dark matter to < 0.3(3)%.

This is the associated data release for our search for sub-solar mass black holes merging with stellar-mass black holes. A preprint version of the paper is available on arxiv. This release contains configuration files of the search, a top list of candidates, and the template bank used for the analysis.

License and Citation

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

We encourage use of these data in derivative works. If you use the material provided here, please cite the paper using the reference:

@article{Nitz:2020bdb,
    author = "Nitz, Alexander Harvey and Wang, Yi-Fan",
    title = "{Search for gravitational waves from high-mass-ratio compact-binary mergers of stellar mass and sub-solar mass black holes}",
    eprint = "2007.03583",
    archivePrefix = "arXiv",
    primaryClass = "astro-ph.HE",
    month = "7",
    year = "2020"
}

• PyCBC code version (https://github.com/ahnitz/pycbc/tree/hmr)

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the Max Planck Gesellschaft and the Atlas cluster computing team at AEI Hannover for support. Research supported by Maria de Maeztu Unit of Excellence MDM-2016-0692. This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. NSF PHY-1748958. This research has made use of data, software and/or web tools obtained from the Gravitational Wave Open Science Center (https://www.gw-openscience.org), a service of LIGO Laboratory, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration. LIGO is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Virgo is funded by the French Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Italian Istituto Nazionale della Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and the Dutch Nikhef, with contributions by Polish and Hungarian institutes.