Gravitational wave constraints on planetary-mass primordial black holes using LIGO O3a data

Abstract

Gravitational waves from sub-solar mass inspiraling compact objects would provide almost smoking-gun evidence for primordial black holes (PBHs). We perform the first search for inspiraling planetary-mass compact objects in equal-mass and highly asymmetric mass-ratio binaries using data from the first half of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA third observing run. Though we do not find any significant candidates, we determine the maximum luminosity distance reachable with our search to be of $O(0.1-100)$ kpc, and corresponding model-independent upper limits on the merger rate densities to be $O(10^3-10^{-7})$ kpc${}^{-3}$yr${}^{-1}$ for systems with chirp masses of $O(10^{-4}-10^{-2})M_{\odot }$, respectively. Furthermore, we interpret these rate densities as arising from PBH binaries and constrain the fraction of dark matter that such objects could comprise. For equal-mass PBH binaries, we find that these objects would compose less than 4-100% of DM for PBH masses of $10^{-2}{M}_{\odot }$ to $2\times 10^{-3}{M}_{\odot }$, respectively. For asymmetric binaries, assuming one black hole mass corresponds to a peak in the mass function at 2.5$M_{\odot }$, a PBH dark-matter fraction of 10% and a second, much lighter PBH, we constrain the mass function of the second PBH to be less than 1 for masses between $1.5\times 10^{-5}{M}_{\odot }$ and $2\times 10^{-4}{M}_{\odot }$. Our constraints, released on Zenodo, are robust enough to be applied to any PBH or exotic compact object binary formation models, and complement existence microlensing results. More details about our search can be found in our companion paper.

6 pages, accepted in PRL. Comments are welcome! Upper limit data on Zenodo: https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10724845. Companion paper: arXiv:2407.17052. The appendix in v1 has been moved to our companion paper, which contains a lot more details about our method

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