No Arabic abstract
Detection of gravitational waves (GW) from highly eccentric binary black hole (BBH) systems can provide insight into their dynamics and formation. To date, no BBH systems have been detected with eccentricity $e > 0.1$, making it difficult to constrain their formation pathways. Current search methods used by ground based GW detectors are not equipped to detect highly eccentric sources. Template based, matched-filter searches lack reliable highly eccentric waveform models. Unmodeled burst searches are designed to detected localized excess power and are unable to identify multiple isolated bursts as originating from a single highly eccentric BBH. Therefore, we propose a signal based prior that can be incorporated into an existing GW burst search to target highly eccentric BBHs. Our eccentric burst prior is based on the Newtonian burst model described by Loutrel & Yunes (2017). As a proof of concept, we tested our method on simulated data and found that for intermediate SNR $sim3-6$ using the eccentric burst prior more effectively localized GW bursts compared to a uniform prior.
Gravitational wave echoes may provide a smoking gun signal for new physics in the immediate vicinity of black holes. As a quasi-periodic signal in time, echoes are characterized by the nearly constant time delay, and its precise measurement can help reveal a Planck scale deviation outside of the would-be horizon. Different search methods have been developed for this quasi-periodic signal, while the searches suffer from large theoretical uncertainties of the echo waveform associated with the near-horizon physics. On the other hand, a coherent combine of a large number of pulses gives rise to a generic narrow resonance structure for the echo amplitude in frequency. The quasi-periodic resonance structure sets a complementary search target for echoes, and the time delay is inversely related to the average resonance spacing. A uniform comb has been proposed to look for the resonance structure in a rather model independent way. In this paper, we develop a Bayesian algorithm to search for the resonance structure based on combs, where a phase-marginalized likelihood plays an essential role. The algorithm is validated with signal injections in detector noise from Advanced LIGO. With special treatments of the non-Gaussian artifacts, the noise outliers of the log Bayes factor distribution are properly removed. An echo signal not significantly below noise is detectable, and the time delay can be determined to very high precision. We perform the proposed search on real gravitational wave strain data of the first observing run of Advanced LIGO. We find no clear evidence of a comb-like structure for GW150914 and GW151012.
Ultralight bosons can be abundantly produced through superradiance process by a spinning black hole and form a bound state with hydrogen-like spectrum. We show that such a gravitational atom typically possesses anomalously large mass quadrupole and leads to significant orbital precession when it forms an eccentric binary with a second compact object. Dynamically formed black hole binaries or pulsar-black hole binaries are typically eccentric during their early inspirals. We show that the large orbital precession can generate distinct and observable signature in their gravitational wave or pulsar timing signals.
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.
Over the past couple of decades, researchers have predicted more than a dozen super-Chandrasekhar white dwarfs from the detections of over-luminous type Ia supernovae. It turns out that magnetic fields and rotation can explain such massive white dwarfs. If these rotating magnetized white dwarfs follow specific conditions, they can efficiently emit continuous gravitational waves and various futuristic detectors, viz. LISA, BBO, DECIGO, and ALIA can detect such gravitational waves with a significant signal-to-noise ratio. Moreover, we discuss various timescales over which these white dwarfs can emit dipole and quadrupole radiations and show that in the future, the gravitational wave detectors can directly detect the super-Chandrasekhar white dwarfs depending on the magnetic field geometry and its strength.
A method is described for the detection and estimation of transient chirp signals that are characterized by smoothly evolving, but otherwise unmodeled, amplitude envelopes and instantaneous frequencies. Such signals are particularly relevant for gravitational wave searches, where they may arise in a wide range of astrophysical scenarios. The method uses splines with continuously adjustable breakpoints to represent the amplitude envelope and instantaneous frequency of a signal, and estimates them from noisy data using penalized least squares and model selection. Simulations based on waveforms spanning a wide morphological range show that the method performs well in a signal-to-noise ratio regime where the time-frequency signature of a signal is highly degraded, thereby extending the coverage of current unmodeled gravitational wave searches to a wider class of signals.