Search for subsolar-mass black hole binaries in the second part of Advanced LIGO’s and Advanced Virgo’s third observing run

Authors

R. AbbottFollow
H. Abe
F. Acernese
Teviet Creighton, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow
Mario C. Diaz, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow
Francisco Llamas, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Soma Mukherjee, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow
Gaukhar Nurbek, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow
Volker Quetschke, The University of Texas Rio Grande ValleyFollow
Wenhui Wang, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-2023

Abstract

We describe a search for gravitational waves from compact binaries with at least one component with mass 0.2 –1.0M⊙ and mass ratio q ≥ 0.1 in Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Advanced Virgo data collected between 2019 November 1, 15:00 UTC and 2020 March 27, 17:00 UTC. No signals were detected. The most significant candidate has a false alarm rate of 0.2yr−1 ⁠. We estimate the sensitivity of our search over the entirety of Advanced LIGO’s and Advanced Virgo’s third observing run, and present the most stringent limits to date on the merger rate of binary black holes with at least one subsolar-mass component. We use the upper limits to constrain two fiducial scenarios that could produce subsolar-mass black holes: primordial black holes (PBH) and a model of dissipative dark matter. The PBH model uses recent prescriptions for the merger rate of PBH binaries that include a rate suppression factor to effectively account for PBH early binary disruptions. If the PBHs are monochromatically distributed, we can exclude a dark matter fraction in PBHs fPBH≳0.6 (at 90 percent confidence) in the probed subsolar-mass range. However, if we allow for broad PBH mass distributions, we are unable to rule out fPBH = 1. For the dissipative model, where the dark matter has chemistry that allows a small fraction to cool and collapse into black holes, we find an upper bound fDBH < 10−5 on the fraction of atomic dark matter collapsed into black holes.

Comments

© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society.

Recommended Citation

LVK Collaboration. "Search for subsolar-mass black hole binaries in the second part of Advanced LIGO’s and Advanced Virgo’s third observing run." Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 524, no. 4 (2023): 5984-5992. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad588

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Publication Title

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad588