TY - JOUR

T1 - Targeted search for gravitational waves from highly spinning light compact binaries

AU - Wang, Yi Fan

AU - Nitz, Alexander H.

N1 - Funding Information: Y-FW and AHN acknowledge the Max Planck Gesellschaft and the Atlas cluster computing team at AEI Hannover for technical support. AHN acknowledges support from NSF grant PHY-2309240. This research has made use of data, software, and/or web tools obtained from the Gravitational Wave Open Science Center ( https://www.gw-openscience.org ), a service of LIGO Laboratory, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and the Virgo Collaboration. LIGO is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Virgo is funded by the French Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Italian Istituto Nazionale della Fisica Nucleare (INFN), and the Dutch Nikhef, with contributions by Polish and Hungarian institutes.

PY - 2024/3

Y1 - 2024/3

N2 - Searches for gravitational waves from compact binary mergers, which to date have reported ∼100 observations, have previously ignored binaries whose components are consistent with the mass of neutron stars (1-2 M⊙) and have high dimensionless spin >0.05. While previous searches targeted sources that are representative of observed neutron star binaries in the Galaxy, it is already known that neutron stars can regularly be spun up to a dimensionless spin of ∼0.4, and in principle reach up to ∼0.7 before breakup would occur. Furthermore, there may be primordial black hole binaries or exotic formation mechanisms to produce light black holes. In these cases, it is possible for the binary constituent to be spun up beyond that achievable by a neutron star. A single detection of this type of source would reveal a novel formation channel for compact binaries. To determine whether there is evidence for any such sources, we use pycbc to conduct a targeted search of LIGO and Virgo data for light compact objects with high spin. Our analysis detects previously known observations GW170817 and GW200115; however, we report no additional mergers. The most significant candidate, not previously known, is consistent with the noise distribution, and so we constrain the merger rate of spinning light binaries.

AB - Searches for gravitational waves from compact binary mergers, which to date have reported ∼100 observations, have previously ignored binaries whose components are consistent with the mass of neutron stars (1-2 M⊙) and have high dimensionless spin >0.05. While previous searches targeted sources that are representative of observed neutron star binaries in the Galaxy, it is already known that neutron stars can regularly be spun up to a dimensionless spin of ∼0.4, and in principle reach up to ∼0.7 before breakup would occur. Furthermore, there may be primordial black hole binaries or exotic formation mechanisms to produce light black holes. In these cases, it is possible for the binary constituent to be spun up beyond that achievable by a neutron star. A single detection of this type of source would reveal a novel formation channel for compact binaries. To determine whether there is evidence for any such sources, we use pycbc to conduct a targeted search of LIGO and Virgo data for light compact objects with high spin. Our analysis detects previously known observations GW170817 and GW200115; however, we report no additional mergers. The most significant candidate, not previously known, is consistent with the noise distribution, and so we constrain the merger rate of spinning light binaries.

KW - black hole

KW - gravitational waves

KW - neutron star mergers

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85184382225&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.48550/arXiv.2308.16173

DO - 10.48550/arXiv.2308.16173

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85184382225

VL - 528

SP - 3891

EP - 3896

JO - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

JF - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

SN - 0035-8711

IS - 3

ER -