Targeted Search for Gravitational Waves from Highly Spinning Light Compact Binaries

Yi-Fan Wang^{1, 2}, Alexander H. Nitz³,

<sub>1. Max-Planck-Institut for Gravitationsphysik (Albert-Einstein-Institut), D-30167 Hannover, Germany
2. Leibniz Universitat Hannover, D-30167 Hannover, Germany
3. Department of Physics, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA</sub>

Introduction

Searches for gravitational waves from compact-binary mergers, which to date have reported ∼ 100 observations, have previously ignored binaries whose components are both consistent with the mass of neutron stars (1M⊙ to 2M⊙ ) 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 if 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.

A preprint version of the paper is available on arxiv.

This release contains configuration files of the search.

Search results

We also release all the triggers from the search. Due to the file size limit of github, we store the file in Atlas cluster's server. The file size is 265M.

Click here to start download coincs.hdf. It contains associated parameters of each trigger, such as SNR, ranking statistic, trigger time, etc.

License and Citation

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

We encourage use of these data in derivative works. If you use the material provided here, please cite the paper using the reference:

@article{Wang:2023qgw,
    author = "Wang, Yi-Fan and Nitz, Alexander H.",
    title = "{First Targeted Search for Gravitational Waves from Highly Spinning Light Compact Binaries}",
    eprint = "2308.16173",
    archivePrefix = "arXiv",
    primaryClass = "astro-ph.HE",
    month = "8",
    year = "2023"
}