Search for Multi-messenger Sources of Gravitational Waves and High-energy Neutrinos with Advanced LIGO during its first Observing Run, ANTARES and IceCube

TL;DR

This study conducted a joint search for gravitational waves and high-energy neutrinos from astrophysical transients using data from Advanced LIGO, ANTARES, and IceCube during their first observing run, aiming to identify common sources and constrain their occurrence rates.

Contribution

It is the first combined search for gravitational waves and high-energy neutrinos with minimal assumptions, utilizing data from multiple observatories to explore astrophysical transient sources.

Findings

No significant coincident detections were found.

Constraints were placed on the rate density of sources emitting both gravitational waves and neutrinos.

Abstract

Astrophysical sources of gravitational waves, such as binary neutron star and black hole mergers or core-collapse supernovae, can drive relativistic outflows, giving rise to non-thermal high-energy emission. High-energy neutrinos are signatures of such outflows. The detection of gravitational waves and high-energy neutrinos from common sources could help establish the connection between the dynamics of the progenitor and the properties of the outflow. We searched for associated emission of gravitational waves and high-energy neutrinos from astrophysical transients with minimal assumptions using data from Advanced LIGO from its first observing run O1, and data from the ANTARES and IceCube neutrino observatories from the same time period. We focused on candidate events whose astrophysical origin could not be determined from a single messenger. We found no significant coincident candidate, which we used to constrain the rate density of astrophysical sources dependent on their gravitational wave and neutrino emission processes.