Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 0712.2050

Search of S3 LIGO data for gravitational wave signals from spinning black hole and neutron star binary inspirals

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration·B. Abbott
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

We report on the methods and results of the first dedicated search for gravitational waves emitted during the inspiral of compact binaries with spinning component bodies. We analyze 788 hours of data collected during the third science run (S3) of the LIGO detectors. We searched for binary systems using a detection template family designed specially to capture the effects of the spin-induced precession of the orbital plane. We present details of the techniques developed to enable this search for spin-modulated gravitational waves, highlighting the differences between this and other recent searches for binaries with non-spinning components. The template bank we employed was found to yield high matches with our spin-modulated target waveform for binaries with masses in the asymmetric range 1.0 Msol < m1 < 3.0 Msol and 12.0 Msol < m2 < 20.0 Msol which is where we would expect the spin of the binary's components to have significant effect. We find that our search of S3 LIGO data had good sensitivity to binaries in the Milky Way and to a small fraction of binaries in M31 and M33 with masses in the range 1.0 Msol < m1, m2 < 20.0 Msol. No gravitational wave signals were identified during this search. Assuming a binary population with spinning components and Gaussian distribution of masses representing a prototypical neutron star - black hole system with m1 ~ 1.35 Msol and m2 ~ 5 Msol, we calculate the 90%-confidence upper limit on the rate of coalescence of these systems to be 15.9 yr^-1 L_10^-1, where L_10 is 10^10 times the blue light luminosity of the Sun.

Explore related subjects

gr-qc

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration, B. Abbott. 2008-06-30. Search of S3 LIGO data for gravitational wave signals from spinning black hole and neutron star binary inspirals. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevd.78.042002

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Electrovacuum Black Hole Uniqueness

We prove the black hole uniqueness conjecture in the axially symmetric, stationary, electrovacuum setting, subject to the refined asymptotic analysis of the associated singular harmonic maps, which includes an analyticity hypothesis at the axes. More precisely, it is shown that any asymptotically flat solution of the Einstein--Maxwell equations in this class, with more than one black hole horizon component is either: Majumdar--Papapetrou, up to a duality rotation, in which case all logarithmic angle defects vanish, or every finite axis rod logarithmic angle defect is strictly negative and hence every interaction force is strictly attractive. The proof extends the singular harmonic map method used for vacuum Kerr uniqueness in [18].

gr-qc↗
arXiv2026

Constraining Modified Mass-to-Horizon Cosmology Through Primordial Inflationary Observables

We investigate slow-roll inflation in a modified cosmological framework inspired by a generalized mass-to-horizon relation (MHR), $M=\gamma {c^2 L^n}/{G}$, where $n$ is a real parameter and $\gamma$ a dimensional constant. Using Padmanabhan's emergence paradigm, we derive the modified Friedmann equations for a flat FRW universe and analyze the dynamics of a canonical scalar field (inflaton) under the slow-roll approximation. We study the resulting inflationary phenomenology for power-law and Starobinsky potentials. For power-law potentials, the MHR modification fails to reconcile these models with current CMB constraints on $r$ and $n_s$. In contrast, Starobinsky inflation exhibits significant sensitivity to deviations from $n=1$. A perturbative analysis ($n=1+\Delta$) yields corrections to inflationary observables. We observe that the scalar power-spectrum normalization, under a fixed-Starobinsky prescription, imposes the stringent constraint $0.960 \lesssim n \lesssim 1.040$ for $N=60$ efolds. This is considerably tighter than spectral-index bounds. Our results establish inflation, particularly Starobinsky-like models, as a sensitive probe of generalized horizon thermodynamics and departures from standard MHR scaling.

gr-qc↗
arXiv2026

Improving the Sensitivity of Gravitational Wave Detection with Weighted Conformal Prediction

In the last decade, kilometre-scale interferometric gravitational-wave detectors have observed hundreds of compact binary mergers, the majority of which are binary black holes. However, the data are noise-dominated, and multiple independent search algorithms (pipelines) are used to enhance sensitivity and improve robustness. Rather than the standard approach of selecting the most significant pipeline output, we combine the outputs from all pipelines using a conformal prediction-based framework to provide statistically rigorous confidence estimates for candidate events. While combining pipelines improves sensitivity and ranking robustness, it requires a principled statistical framework that remains valid as data properties evolve across observing runs. A key challenge is distribution shifts between simulated datasets used for training and calibration and the real, unlabelled, observations used for testing, which can invalidate coverage guarantees and bias confidence estimates. In this work, we address this challenge by incorporating likelihood-ratio reweighting into our conformal prediction framework to account for covariate shift. Using mock datasets containing simulated signals, we demonstrate that weighted conformal prediction restores well-calibrated coverage under covariate shift and increases the confidence of events near the detection threshold, recovering true signals that would otherwise be missed.

gr-qc↗