Search for UHE Photons from Gravitational Wave Sources with the Pierre Auger Observatory

Abstract

A search for time-directional coincidences of ultra-high-energy (UHE) photons above 10 EeV with gravitational wave (GW) events from the LIGO/Virgo runs O1 to O3 is conducted with the Pierre Auger Observatory. Due to the distinctive properties of photon interactions and to the background expected from hadronic showers, a subset of the most interesting GW events is selected based on their localization quality and distance. Time periods of 1000 s around and 1 day after the GW events are analyzed. No coincidences are observed. Upper limits on the UHE photon fluence from a GW event are derived that are typically at $\sim$7 MeV cm${}^{-2}$ (time period 1000~s) and $\sim$35 MeV cm${}^{-2}$ (time period 1 day). Due to the proximity of the binary neutron star merger GW170817, the energy of the source transferred into UHE photons above 40 EeV is constrained to be less than 20% of its total gravitational wave energy. These are the first limits on UHE photons from GW sources.

arXiv comment15 pages

References in corpus (29)

• Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
• HEALPix -- a Framework for High Resolution Discretization, and Fast Analysis of Data Distributed on the Sphere
• Multi-messenger Observations of a Binary Neutron Star Merger
• GWTC-1: A Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog of Compact Binary Mergers Observed by LIGO and Virgo during the First and Second Observing Runs
• A Unified Approach to the Classical Statistical Analysis of Small Signals
• GWTC-2: Compact Binary Coalescences Observed by LIGO and Virgo During the First Half of the Third Observing Run
• The Fermi Gamma-Ray Burst Monitor
• An Ordinary Short Gamma-Ray Burst with Extraordinary Implications: Fermi-GBM Detection of GRB 170817A
• The Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray Observatory
• The IceCube Neutrino Observatory: Instrumentation and Online Systems
• Optical emission from a kilonova following a gravitational-wave-detected neutron-star merger
• Observation of the Crab Nebula with the HAWC Gamma-Ray Observatory
• CRPropa 3 - a Public Astrophysical Simulation Framework for Propagating Extraterrestrial Ultra-High Energy Particles
• Search for High-energy Neutrinos from Binary Neutron Star Merger GW170817 with ANTARES, IceCube, and the Pierre Auger Observatory
• The Distance to NGC 4993: The Host Galaxy of the Gravitational-wave Event GW170817
• Ram-pressure stripping of a kicked Hill sphere: Prompt electromagnetic emission from the merger of stellar mass black holes in an AGN accretion disk
• Lorentz Violation for Photons and Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays
• Search for ultra-high energy photons using air showers
• Photon-axion mixing and ultra-high-energy cosmic rays from BL Lac type objects -- Shining light through the Universe
• High-Energy Neutrinos from Millisecond Magnetars formed from the Merger of Binary Neutron Stars
• Ultrafast Outflows from Black Hole Mergers with a Mini-Disk
• Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Rays and Black Hole Mergers
• Ultrahigh-energy neutrino follow-up of Gravitational Wave events GW150914 and GW151226 with the Pierre Auger Observatory
• A search for photons with energies above $2\times 10^{17}$ eV using hybrid data from the low-energy extensions of the Pierre Auger Observatory
• Multi-Messenger Physics with the Pierre Auger Observatory
• A targeted search for point sources of EeV photons with the Pierre Auger Observatory
• High-energy neutrinos from fallback accretion of binary neutron star merger remnants
• Super-Knee Cosmic Rays from Galactic Neutron Star Merger Remnants
• Binary Neutron Star Merger Remnants as Sources of Cosmic Rays Below the "Ankle"