An optimized PyCBC search for gravitational waves from intermediate-mass black hole mergers

TL;DR

This paper introduces an optimized PyCBC search method for detecting gravitational waves from intermediate-mass black hole mergers, enhancing sensitivity and confirming GW190521, but finds no new IMBH signals.

Contribution

The paper presents a new optimized PyCBC-based search with a targeted template bank and improved discriminators, increasing sensitivity to IMBH mergers.

Findings

Enhanced sensitive volume-time product by 1.5 to 3 times.

Confirmed GW190521 detection with a false alarm rate of 1 in 727 years.

No new IMBH binary signals detected.

Abstract

The detection of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) i.e. those with mass $\sim 100$-$10^5 M_\odot$, is an emerging goal of gravitational-wave (GW) astronomy with wide implications for cosmology and tests of strong-field gravity. Current PyCBC-based searches for compact binary mergers, which matched filter the detector data against a set of template waveforms, have so far detected or confirmed several GW events. However, the sensitivity of these searches to signals arising from mergers of IMBH binaries is not optimal. Here, we present a new optimised PyCBC-based search for such signals. Our search benefits from using a targeted template bank, stricter signal-noise discriminators and a lower matched-filter frequency cut-off. In particular, for a population of simulated signals with isotropically distributed spins, we improve the sensitive volume-time product over previous PyCBC-based searches, at an inverse false alarm rate of 100 years, by a factor of 1.5 to 3 depending on the total binary mass. We deploy this new search on Advanced LIGO-Virgo data from the first half of the third observing run. The search does not identify any new significant IMBH binaries but does confirm the detection of the short-duration GW signal GW190521 with a false alarm rate of 1 in 727 years.