Method to search for inspiraling planetary-mass ultra-compact binaries using the generalized frequency-Hough transform in LIGO O3a data

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel application of the generalized frequency-Hough transform to search for inspiraling planetary-mass ultra-compact binaries in LIGO O3a data, focusing on detecting gravitational waves from primordial black holes.

Contribution

It introduces a new search methodology using the frequency-Hough transform for planetary-mass black holes in gravitational wave data, with detailed analysis and validation procedures.

Findings

Detection pipeline developed and tested on LIGO O3a data

Upper limits established through analytic and injection-based methods

Method demonstrates potential for identifying primordial black hole signals

Abstract

Gravitational waves from sub-solar mass primordial black holes could be detected in LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA data. Here, we apply a method originally designed to look for rapidly spinning-down neutron stars, the generalized frequency-Hough transform, to search for planetary-mass primordial black holes using data from the first half of the third observing run of advanced LIGO. In this companion paper to arXiv:2402.19468, in which the main results of our search are presented, we delve into the details of the search methodology, the choices we have made regarding the parameter space to explore, the follow-up procedure we use to confirm or reject possible candidates returned in our search, and a comparison of our analytic procedure of generating upper limits to those obtained through injections.