A Search For Gravitational Waves from Perturbed Black Hole Ringdowns in LIGO Data

摘要

According to General Relativity a perturbed black hole will return to astable configuration by the emission of gravitational radiation in asuperposition of quasi-normal modes. Such a perturbation will occur due to thecoalescence of a black hole binary, following their inspiral and subsequentmerger. At late times the waveform, which we refer to as a ringdown, isexpected to be dominated by a single mode. As the waveform is well-known themethod of matched filtering can be implemented to search for this signal usingLIGO data. LIGO is sensitive to the dominant mode of perturbed black holes withmasses between 10 and 500 M_sun, the regime of intermediate-mass black holes,to a distance of up to 300 Mpc. We present a search for gravitational wavesfrom black hole ringdowns using data from the fourth LIGO science run. Weimplement a blind analysis of the data. We use Monte Carlo simulations of theexpected waveform, and an estimation of the background from timeslides to tunethe search. We present an analysis of the waveform parameter estimation andestimate the efficiency of the search. As there were no gravitational wavecandidates found, we place an upper limit on the rate of black hole ringdownsin the local universe.