Search for Gravitational Waves from Binary Black Hole Inspiral, Merger and Ringdown in LIGO-Virgo Data from 2009-2010

TL;DR

This paper reports a search for gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers in LIGO-Virgo data from 2009-2010, setting upper limits on coalescence rates due to no detections.

Contribution

It introduces a search method for BBH gravitational waves and provides the first upper limits on coalescence rates for certain mass ranges using early LIGO-Virgo data.

Findings

No gravitational wave signals detected.

Upper limits on BBH coalescence rates established.

Sensitivity dependence on component spins analyzed.

Abstract

We report a search for gravitational waves from the inspiral, merger and ringdown of binary black holes (BBH) with total mass between 25 and 100 solar masses, in data taken at the LIGO and Virgo observatories between July 7, 2009 and October 20, 2010. The maximum sensitive distance of the detectors over this period for a (20,20) Msun coalescence was 300 Mpc. No gravitational wave signals were found. We thus report upper limits on the astrophysical coalescence rates of BBH as a function of the component masses for non-spinning components, and also evaluate the dependence of the search sensitivity on component spins aligned with the orbital angular momentum. We find an upper limit at 90% confidence on the coalescence rate of BBH with non-spinning components of mass between 19 and 28 Msun of 3.3 \times 10^-7 mergers /Mpc^3 /yr.