Dark matter could be composed of compact dark objects (CDOs). A close binary of CDOs orbiting in the interior of solar system bodies can be a loud source of gravitational waves (GWs) for the LIGO and VIRGO detectors. We perform the first search ever for this type of signal and rule out close binaries, with separations of order 300 m, orbiting near the center of the Sun with GW frequencies (twice the orbital frequency) between 50 and 550 Hz and CDO masses above $approx 10^{-9} M_odot$. This mass limit is eight orders of magnitude lower than the mass probed in a LIGO search at extra galactic distances.
If a significant fraction of dark matter is in the form of compact objects, they will cause microlensing effects in the gravitational wave (GW) signals observable by LIGO and Virgo. From the non-observation of microlensing signatures in the binary black hole events from the first two observing runs and the first half of the third observing run, we constrain the fraction of compact dark matter in the mass range $10^2-10^5~{M_odot}$ to be less than $simeq 50-80%$ (details depend on the assumed source population properties and the Bayesian priors). These modest constraints will be significantly improved in the next few years with the expected detection of thousands of binary black hole events, providing a new avenue to probe the nature of dark matter.
We report the results of a directed search for continuous gravitational-wave emission in a broad frequency range (between 50 and 1000 Hz) from the central compact object of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A). The data comes from the sixth science run of LIGO and the search is performed on the volunteer distributed computing network Einstein@Home. We find no significant signal candidate, and set the most constraining upper limits to date on the gravitational-wave emission from Cas A, which beat the indirect age-based upper limit across the entire search range. At around 170 Hz (the most sensitive frequency range), we set 90% confidence upper limits on the gravitational wave amplitude $h_0$ of $sim!!~2.9times 10^{-25}$, roughly twice as constraining as the upper limits from previous searches on Cas A. The upper limits can also be expressed as constraints on the ellipticity of Cas A; with a few reasonable assumptions, we show that at gravitational-wave frequencies greater than 300~Hz, we can exclude an ellipticity of $gtrsim!!~10^{-5}$.
We investigate the wave effects of gravitational waves (GWs) using numerical simulations with the finite element method (FEM) based on the publicly available code {it deal.ii}. We robustly test our code using a point source monochromatic spherical wave. We examine not only the waveform observed by a local observer but also the global energy conservation of the waves. We find that our numerical results agree very well with the analytical predictions. Based on our code, we study the scattering of GWs by compact objects. Using monochromatic waves as the input source, we find that if the wavelength of GWs is much larger than the Schwarzschild radius of the compact object, the amplitude of the total scattered GWs does not change appreciably due to the strong diffraction effect, for an observer far away from the scatterer. This finding is consistent with the results reported in the literature. However, we also find that, near the scatterer, not only the amplitude of the scattered waves is very large, comparable to that of the incident waves, but also the phase of the GWs changes significantly due to the interference between the scattered and incident waves. As the evolution of the phase of GWs plays a crucial role in the matched filtering technique in extracting GW signals from the noisy background, our findings suggest that wave effects should be taken into account in the data analysis in the future low-frequency GW experiments, if GWs are scattered by nearby compact objects in our local environment.
Third-generation (3G) gravitational-wave detectors will observe thousands of coalescing neutron star binaries with unprecedented fidelity. Extracting the highest precision science from these signals is expected to be challenging owing to both high signal-to-noise ratios and long-duration signals. We demonstrate that current Bayesian inference paradigms can be extended to the analysis of binary neutron star signals without breaking the computational bank. We construct reduced order models for $sim 90,mathrm{minute}$ long gravitational-wave signals, covering the observing band ($5-2048,mathrm{Hz}$), speeding up inference by a factor of $sim 1.3times 10^4$ compared to the calculation times without reduced order models. The reduced order models incorporate key physics including the effects of tidal deformability, amplitude modulation due to the Earths rotation, and spin-induced orbital precession. We show how reduced order modeling can accelerate inference on data containing multiple, overlapping gravitational-wave signals, and determine the speedup as a function of the number of overlapping signals. Thus, we conclude that Bayesian inference is computationally tractable for the long-lived, overlapping, high signal-to-noise-ratio events present in 3G observatories.
Most of compact binary systems are expected to circularize before the frequency of emitted gravitational waves (GWs) enters the sensitivity band of the ground based interferometric detectors. However, several mechanisms have been proposed for the formation of binary systems, which retain eccentricity throughout their lifetimes. Since no matched-filtering algorithm has been developed to extract continuous GW signals from compact binaries on orbits with low to moderate values of eccentricity, and available algorithms to detect binaries on quasi-circular orbits are sub-optimal to recover these events, in this paper we propose a search method for detection of gravitational waves produced from the coalescences of eccentric binary black holes (eBBH). We study the search sensitivity and the false alarm rates on a segment of data from the second joint science run of LIGO and Virgo detectors, and discuss the implications of the eccentric binary search for the advanced GW detectors.