# Search for gravitational radiation from intermediate mass black hole binaries in data from the second LIGO-Virgo joint science run

1 APC - Cosmologie
PCC - Physique Corpusculaire et Cosmologie - Collège de France, APC - UMR 7164 - AstroParticule et Cosmologie
8 APC-Gravitation - APC - Gravitation
APC - UMR 7164 - AstroParticule et Cosmologie, AEI - Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik ( Albert-Einstein-Institut )
Abstract : This paper reports on an unmodeled, all-sky search for gravitational waves from merging intermediate mass black hole binaries (IMBHB). The search was performed on data from the second joint science run of the LIGO and Virgo detectors (July 2009 - October 2010) and was sensitive to IMBHBs with a range up to $\sim 200$ Mpc, averaged over the possible sky positions and inclinations of the binaries with respect to the line of sight. No significant candidate was found. Upper limits on the coalescence-rate density of non-spinning IMBHBs with total masses between 100 and $450 \ \mbox{M}_{\odot}$ and mass ratios between $0.25$ and $1\,$ were placed by combining this analysis with an analogous search performed on data from the first LIGO-Virgo joint science run (November 2005 - October 2007). The most stringent limit was set for systems consisting of two $88 \ \mbox{M}_{\odot}$ black holes and is equal to $0.12 \ \mbox{Mpc}^{-3} \ \mbox{Myr}^{-1}$ at the $90\%$ confidence level. This paper also presents the first estimate, for the case of an unmodeled analysis, of the impact on the search range of IMBHB spin configurations: the visible volume for IMBHBs with non-spinning components is roughly doubled for a population of IMBHBs with spins aligned with the binary's orbital angular momentum and uniformly distributed in the dimensionless spin parameter up to 0.8, whereas an analogous population with anti-aligned spins decreases the visible volume by $\sim 20\%\,$.
Type de document :
Article dans une revue
Physical Review D, American Physical Society, 2014, 89, pp.12203. 〈10.1103/PhysRevD.89.122003〉
Domaine :