Search for gravitational waves from binary black hole inspiral, merger, and ringdown

We present the first modeled search for gravitational waves using the complete binary black-hole gravitational waveform from inspiral through the merger and ringdown for binaries with negligible component spin. We searched approximately 2 years of LIGO data, taken between November 2005 and September 2007, for systems with component masses of $1–99M_{\odot }$ and total masses of $25–100M_{\odot }$. We did not detect any plausible gravitational-wave signals but we do place upper limits on the merger rate of binary black holes as a function of the component masses in this range. We constrain the rate of mergers for $19M_{\odot }\le m_1$, $m_2\le 28M_{\odot }$ binary black-hole systems with negligible spin to be no more than $2.0{\mathrm{Mpc}}^{-3}{\mathrm{Myr}}^{-1}$ at 90% confidence.

Figure 1

Example of the EOBNRv1 IMR waveforms used in this search for a $(25+25)M_{\odot }$ binary optimally located and oriented at 100 Mpc in the time domain (top panel) and the frequency domain (bottom panel). The solid vertical lines mark the location of the Schwarzschild ISCO, which is the termination point for inspiral-only waveforms. The oscillations appearing in the template $\tilde{h}(f)$ at low frequencies are due to the abrupt start of the time-domain waveform. However, the detectors have very little sensitivity at these frequencies, and so these oscillations have a negligible effect on the matched filter output.

Figure 2

The 90% confidence upper limit on the merger rate as a function of mass in units of $M_{\odot }$ (symmetric over $m_1$ and $m_2$). This image represents the rate limit in units of ${\mathrm{Mpc}}^{-3}{\mathrm{Myr}}^{-1}$. These limits can be converted to traditional units of $L_{10}^{-1}{\mathrm{Myr}}^{-1}$ by dividing by $0.0198L_{10}{\mathrm{Mpc}}^{-3}$ [99]. Only bins with mass ratios $<4:1$ have upper limits computed due to uncertainty in the waveform models for more asymmetric systems.

Figure 3

Average range defined in (5.9) for the search in Mpc as a function of mass (symmetric over $m_1$ and $m_2$), assuming target waveforms that match the EOB and Phenomenological models.