ausblenden:
Schlagwörter:
General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology, gr-qc
Zusammenfassung:
We report results from a search for gravitational waves produced by perturbed
intermediate mass black holes (IMBH) in data collected by LIGO and Virgo
between 2005 and 2010. The search was sensitive to astrophysical sources that
produced damped sinusoid gravitational wave signals, also known as ringdowns,
with frequency $50\le f_{0}/\mathrm{Hz} \le 2000$ and decay timescale
$0.0001\lesssim \tau/\mathrm{s} \lesssim 0.1$ characteristic of those produced
in mergers of IMBH pairs. No significant gravitational wave candidate was
detected. We report upper limits on the astrophysical coalescence rates of
IMBHs with total binary mass $50 \le M/\mathrm{M}_\odot \le 450$ and component
mass ratios of either 1:1 or 4:1. For systems with total mass $100 \le
M/\mathrm{M}_\odot \le 150$, we report a 90%-confidence upper limit on the rate
of binary IMBH mergers with non-spinning and equal mass components of
$6.9\times10^{-8}\,$Mpc$^{-3}$yr$^{-1}$. We also report a rate upper limit for
ringdown waveforms from perturbed IMBHs, radiating 1% of their mass as
gravitational waves in the fundamental, $\ell=m=2$, oscillation mode, that is
nearly three orders of magnitude more stringent than previous results.
