Searching for joint neutrino and gravitational wave emission from the environment of Active Galactic Nuclei

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to detect coincident gravitational wave and neutrino signals from active galactic nuclei, aiming to explore a promising environment for binary black hole mergers.

Contribution

It introduces an unbinned maximum likelihood analysis technique to search for joint signals from AGN using existing public data, advancing multimessenger astrophysics.

Findings

Method successfully applied to current data

No significant joint signals detected

Provides a framework for future multimessenger searches

Abstract

With the observation of gravitational waves from merging compact binary systems, a new observing window of the universe has been opened. Most of the gravitational wave events currently detected are due to the merger of binary black hole systems. One way to better investigate such systems is to look for coincident emission in electromagnetic waves or neutrinos. For typical models of isolated binaries, no such emission is expected. However, one promising class of mergers is that of binary black holes in the accretion disk of active galactic nuclei. Such mergers potentially occur at high rates, since these environments naturally have high numbers of black holes, which can efficiently form binaries, merge rapidly, and potentially accrete matter fast due to the surrounding gas. Here, we propose a method to search for coincident gravitational wave and neutrino emission from the location of known AGN, using an unbinned maximum likelihood analysis, and apply it to currently available public data.