Constraints and prospects on GW and neutrino emissions using GW150914

TL;DR

This paper investigates the implications of non-detection of neutrinos from GW150914, constraining the neutrino emission relative to gravitational waves and exploring future detection prospects to better understand black hole merger environments.

Contribution

It provides the first bounds on neutrino emission from GW150914 using non-detections and discusses how future observations could significantly improve these constraints.

Findings

Non-detection bounds are comparable to diffuse neutrino flux constraints.

Constraints limit matter in black hole binary environments.

Future neutrino detections could reveal source population details.

Abstract

Recently, the LIGO observatory reported the first direct observation of gravitational waves, with a signal consistent with a binary black hole merger. This detection triggered several follow-up searches for coincident emission in electromagnetic waves as well as neutrinos, but no such emission was found. In this article, the implications of the non-detection of counterpart neutrinos are investigated using general arguments. The results are interpreted with a parameter denoting the energy emitted in neutrinos relative to the energy emitted in gravitational waves. The bound on this parameter from the diffuse astrophysical neutrino flux detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory is discussed. It is found that, currently, the non-detection of counterpart neutrinos puts a bound comparable to the one from the diffuse astrophysical neutrino flux. This bound is then used to constrain the amount of matter in the black hole binary environment. Finally, the sensitivity to this parameter in future gravitational wave observation runs is investigated. It is shown how the detection of one or more neutrinos from a single merger would strongly constrain the source population and evolution.