Searching for gravitational wave echoes from black hole binary events in the third observing run of LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA collaborations

TL;DR

This study searches for gravitational wave echoes in the third LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA observing run, finding no significant signals, thereby constraining models of near-horizon modifications of black holes.

Contribution

It extends previous searches by analyzing more events from O3 with two echo models, providing a comprehensive statistical assessment of echo signals.

Findings

No significant echo signals detected in O3 data.

Distribution of p-values consistent with noise.

Constraints on models predicting gravitational wave echoes.

Abstract

Gravitational wave echo signals have been proposed as evidence for the modification of the spacetime structure near the classical event horizon. These signals are expected to occur after the mergers of compact binaries as a sequence of weak pulse-like signals. Some studies have shown evidence of the echo signals from several binary black hole merger events. On the other hand, the other studies have shown the low significance of such signals from various events in the first, second and third observing runs (O1, O2 and O3). Our previous study also shows the low significance of echo signals from events in O1 and O2, though, we observe that more than half of the events have p-value smaller than 0.1 when the simply modeled waveform is used for the analysis. Since there are only nine events appropriate for this analysis in O1 and O2, it is necessary to analyze more events to evaluate the significance statistically. In this study, we search for echo signals from binary black hole events observed during O3 operated by LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA collaborations. We perform the template-based search by using two different models for echo signal templates: simply modeled one and physically motivated one. Our results show that the distributions of p-values for all events analyzed in this study are consistent with the noise distribution. This means that no significant echo signals are found for both models from O3 events.