paper

Search for Eccentric Binary Neutron Star Mergers in the first and second observing runs of Advanced LIGO

arXiv:1912.05464 · doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ab6611

Abstract

We present a search for gravitational waves from merging binary neutron stars which have non-negligible eccentricity as they enter the LIGO observing band. We use the public Advanced LIGO data which covers the period from 2015 through 2017 and contains days of LIGO-Hanford and LIGO-Livingston coincident observing time. The search was conducted using matched-filtering using the PyCBC toolkit. We find no significant binary neutron star candidates beyond GW170817, which has previously been reported by searches for binaries in circular orbits. We place a 90% upper limit of mergers for eccentricities at a dominant-mode gravitational-wave frequency of 10 Hz. The absence of a detection with these data is consistent with theoretical predictions of eccentric binary neutron star merger rates. Using our measured rate we estimate the sensitive volume of future gravitational-wave detectors and compare this to theoretical rate predictions. We find that, in the absence of a prior detection, the rate limits set by six months of Cosmic Explorer observations would constrain all current plausible models of eccentric binary neutron star formation.

arXiv comment7 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, supplemental materials at https://github.com/gwastro/eccentric-bns-search, revised to match version accepted by ApJ

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