All-sky search for short gravitational-wave bursts in the first Advanced LIGO run

TL;DR

This paper reports an all-sky search for short-duration gravitational waves using Advanced LIGO data, successfully detecting GW150914 and setting new upper limits on rates of other transient sources.

Contribution

It introduces a wide-range, minimal-assumption search method and provides the first detection of a gravitational-wave burst in this context.

Findings

Detection of GW150914 with high confidence

No other significant gravitational-wave transient signals found

Stricter upper limits on event rates than previous studies

Abstract

We present the results from an all-sky search for short-duration gravitational waves in the data of the first run of the Advanced LIGO detectors between September 2015 and January 2016. The search algorithms use minimal assumptions on the signal morphology, so they are sensitive to a wide range of sources emitting gravitational waves. The analyses target transient signals with duration ranging from milliseconds to seconds over the frequency band of 32 to 4096 Hz. The first observed gravitational-wave event, GW150914, has been detected with high confidence in this search; other known gravitational-wave events fall below the search's sensitivity. Besides GW150914, all of the search results are consistent with the expected rate of accidental noise coincidences. Finally, we estimate rate-density limits for a broad range of non-BBH transient gravitational-wave sources as a function of their gravitational radiation emission energy and their characteristic frequency. These rate-density upper-limits are stricter than those previously published by an order-of-magnitude.