All-sky search for short gravitational-wave bursts in the third Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo run

TL;DR

This paper reports on a comprehensive all-sky search for short gravitational-wave bursts in LIGO and Virgo data, setting new upper limits on source rates and demonstrating sensitivity to various astrophysical signals.

Contribution

It introduces an all-sky, unmodeled search method for short gravitational-wave transients, improving upper limits and sensitivity over previous searches.

Findings

No significant gravitational-wave burst detections beyond known binary coalescences.

Upper limits on source rate-density are roughly ten times better than previous constraints.

Sensitive to signals as weak as 10^{-10} solar masses c^2} at 70 Hz from 10 kpc.

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a search for generic short-duration gravitational-wave transients in data from the third observing run of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo. Transients with durations of milliseconds to a few seconds in the 24--4096 Hz frequency band are targeted by the search, with no assumptions made regarding the incoming signal direction, polarization or morphology. Gravitational waves from compact binary coalescences that have been identified by other targeted analyses are detected, but no statistically significant evidence for other gravitational wave bursts is found. Sensitivities to a variety of signals are presented. These include updated upper limits on the source rate-density as a function of the characteristic frequency of the signal, which are roughly an order of magnitude better than previous upper limits. This search is sensitive to sources radiating as little as $\sim$10$^{-10} M_{\odot} c^2$ in gravitational waves at $\sim$70 Hz from a distance of 10~kpc, with 50\% detection efficiency at a false alarm rate of one per century. The sensitivity of this search to two plausible astrophysical sources is estimated: neutron star f-modes, which may be excited by pulsar glitches, as well as selected core-collapse supernova models.