Searching for double-peak and doubly broken gravitational-wave spectra from Advanced LIGO-Virgo's first three observing runs

TL;DR

This paper analyzes LIGO-Virgo data to search for complex gravitational-wave spectra with double peaks or double breaks, placing constraints on their amplitudes and ruling out certain early universe phase transition models.

Contribution

It provides the first constraints on double-peak and doubly broken gravitational-wave spectra from cosmological phase transitions using LIGO-Virgo data.

Findings

Strong negative evidence for double-peak spectra, constraining their amplitudes.

Weak negative evidence for doubly broken spectra, setting upper limits.

Marginally rules out strong super-cooling first-order phase transitions.

Abstract

The current LIGO-Virgo observing run has been pushing the sensitivity limit to touch the stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds (SGWBs). However, no significant detection has been reported to date for any single dominated source of SGWBs with a single broken-power-law (BPL) spectrum. Nevertheless, it could equally well escape from existing Bayesian searches from, for example, two comparable dominated sources with two separate BPL spectra (double-peak case) or a single source with its power-law behavior in the spectrum broken twice (doubly broken case). In this paper, we put constraints on these two cases but specifically for the model with cosmological first-order phase transitions from Advanced LIGO-Virgo's first three observing runs. We found strong negative evidence for the double-peak case and hence place 95\% C.L. upper limits $\Omega_\mathrm{BPL,1}<5.8\times10^{-8}$ and $\Omega_\mathrm{BPL,2}<4.4\times10^{-8}$ on the two BPL spectra amplitudes with respect to the unresolved compact binary coalescence (CBC) amplitude $\Omega_\mathrm{CBC}<5.6\times10^{-9}$. We further found weak negative evidence for the doubly broken case and hence place 95\% C.L. upper limit $\Omega_\mathrm{DB}<1.2\times10^{-7}$ on the overall amplitude of the doubly broken spectrum with respect to $\Omega_\mathrm{CBC}<6.0\times10^{-9}$. In particular, the results from the double-peak case have marginally ruled out the strong super-cooling first-order phase transitions at LIGO-Virgo band.