IceCube Search for Neutrinos Coincident with Compact Binary Mergers from LIGO-Virgo’s First Gravitational-wave Transient Catalog

Abstract

We present the results of a search for MeV-scale electron antineutrino events in Kam-LAND in coincident with the 60 gravitational wave events/candidates reported by the LIGO/Virgo collaboration during their second and third observing runs. We find no significant coincident signals within a ±500 s timing window from each gravitational wave and present 90% C.L. upper limits on the electron antineutrino fluence between 10 8-10 13 cm 2 for neutrino energies in the energy range of 1.8-111 MeV.

Follow-up of Astrophysical Transients in Real Time with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory

“…Here, α 0 , and δ 0 denote the location in the sky, corresponding to the maximum of this PDF, and  is the test statistic defined in Equation (4). This technique has also been used in dedicated analyses searching for counterparts to gravitational wave progenitors (Aartsen et al 2020f), ANITA neutrino candidates (Aartsen et al 2020g), and ultra-highenergy cosmic rays (Schumacher 2019).…”

“…(1) extreme blazar flares, particularly those detected in extremely high energies, (2) bright GRBs, in particular the few detected by imaging air Cherenkov telescopes, (3) welllocalized gravitational waves, (4) FRBs whose detections are released in real time, and (5) multi-messenger alert streams from the Astrophysical Multi-messenger observatory Network 65 . Since the pipeline's creation, some of these source classes, such as gravitational waves, have enjoyed dedicated real-time analyses (Aartsen et al 2020f). Dedicated real-time follow-ups of GRBs, as well as the use of this pipeline to follow up neutrino candidate events sent by IceCube via AMON, will be the subjects of future works.…”

“…It is not until neutrino data are correlated with lists of candidate neutrino emitters from EM observations that indications of neutrino signals from observed sources begin to manifest above the background expectation (Aartsen et al 2020b). However, attempts to correlate astrophysical neutrinos with known sources thus far have fallen short of explaining diffuse flux, such as trying to correlate neutrinos with gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) (Aartsen et al 2017a), gamma-ray detected blazars (Aartsen et al 2017), fast radio bursts (FRBs) (Aartsen et al 2020c(Aartsen et al , 2018c, the Galactic plane (Aartsen et al 2017b), large-scale structures (Aartsen et al 2020d;Fang et al 2020), pulsar wind nebulae (Aartsen et al 2020e), and the progenitors of gravitational waves (Albert et al 2019(Albert et al , 2017Aartsen et al 2020f;ANTARES Collaboration et al 2020;Hussain et al 2020;Keivani et al 2020). Many of these searches have set strong constraints on source classes which were once believed to be dominant sources of astrophysical neutrinos.…”

Mergers of Binary Neutron Star Systems: A Multimessenger Revolution

“…Finally, the possible detection of elusive MeV and >GeV neutrinos associated with the kilonova (Kyutoku and Kashiyama, 2018) and with the GRB (Bartos et al, 2019;Aartsen et al, 2020), respectively, will bring an extra carrier of information into play and thus complete the multimessenger picture associated with the binary neutron star merger phenomenon. Gravitational waves from binary neutron star inspirals and mergers; gamma-ray photons-downscattered to UV/optical/ infrared light-from radioactive decay of unstable nuclides of heavy elements, freshly formed after the merger; multiwavelength photons from nonthermal mechanisms in the relativistic jet powered by the merger remnant; and thermal and high-energy neutrinos accompanying the remnant cooling and hadronic processes in the jet, respectively, all collectively underpin the role of the four physical interactions.…”

Multi-messenger searches via IceCube’s high-energy neutrinos and gravitational-wave detections of LIGO/Virgo

“…With developing detectors, platforms for communication between astronomy communities, and efficient statistical methods [1], multi-messenger searches and detections [2][3][4] have become a reality. One multi-messenger combination that hasn't been observed yet is of gravitational-waves (GWs) and high-energy neutrinos, despite previous searches [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. Here we present our searches for high-energy neutrinos originating from the sources of GW events in the GWTC-2 catalog of the LIGO Scientific and Virgo Collaborations [15] with the triggers of the IceCube detector [16].…”