Interpreting the results of searches for gravitational waves from coalescing binaries

Abstract

We introduce a method based on the loudest event statistic to calculate an upper limit or interval on the astrophysical rate of binary coalescence. The calculation depends upon the sensitivity and noise background of the detectors, and a model for the astrophysical distribution of coalescing binaries. There are significant uncertainties in the calculation of the rate due to both astrophysical and instrumental uncertainties as well as errors introduced by using the post--Newtonian waveform to approximate the full signal. We catalog these uncertainties in detail and describe a method for marginalizing over them. Throughout, we provide an example based on the initial LIGO detectors.

16 pages, 7 figures

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Cited by in corpus (13)

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• Search for Gravitational Waves from Binary Black Hole Inspiral, Merger and Ringdown in LIGO-Virgo Data from 2009-2010
• The Loudest Event Statistic: General Formulation, Properties and Applications
• Search of S3 LIGO data for gravitational wave signals from spinning black hole and neutron star binary inspirals
• Removing degeneracy and multimodality in gravitational wave source parameters
• Sensitivity Comparison of Searches for Binary Black Hole Coalescences with Ground-based Gravitational-Wave Detectors
• Inferring Binary Properties from Gravitational Wave Signals
• A Search For Gravitational Waves from Perturbed Black Hole Ringdowns in LIGO Data
• Systematic biases in parameter estimation on LISA binaries. II. The effect of excluding higher harmonics for spin-aligned, high-mass binaries
• Search for planetary-mass ultra-compact binaries using data from the first part of the LIGO--Virgo--KAGRA fourth observing run
• Searching for gravitational waves emitted by binaries with spinning components
• labrador: A domain-optimized machine-learning tool for gravitational wave inference