Multimessenger Science Reach and Analysis Method for Common Sources of Gravitational Waves and High-energy Neutrinos

TL;DR

This paper develops a method for joint analysis of gravitational wave and high-energy neutrino data, estimating the science reach and setting upper limits on source rates for multimessenger astrophysics.

Contribution

It introduces a baseline multimessenger analysis method combining GW and HEN data with galaxy distribution, and evaluates expected source rate limits for current and future detector configurations.

Findings

Derived upper limits on GW+HEN source rates for various models.

Projected sensitivities for initial and advanced GW and HEN detectors.

Constraints on existing multimessenger emission models.

Abstract

We present the baseline multimessenger analysis method for the joint observations of gravitational waves (GW) and high-energy neutrinos (HEN), together with a detailed analysis of the expected science reach of the joint search. The analysis method combines data from GW and HEN detectors, and uses the blue-luminosity-weighted distribution of galaxies. We derive expected GW+HEN source rate upper limits for a wide range of source parameters covering several emission models. Using published sensitivities of externally triggered searches, we derive joint upper limit estimates both for the ongoing analysis with the initial LIGO-Virgo GW detectors with the partial IceCube detector (22 strings) HEN detector and for projected results to advanced LIGO-Virgo detectors with the completed IceCube (86 strings). We discuss the constraints these upper limits impose on some existing GW+HEN emission models.