Search for high-energy neutrinos from gravitational wave event GW151226 and candidate LVT151012 with ANTARES and IceCube

Abstract

The Advanced LIGO observatories detected gravitational waves from two binary black hole mergers during their first observation run (O1). We present a high-energy neutrino follow-up search for the second gravitational wave event, GW151226, as well as for gravitational wave candidate LVT151012. We find two and four neutrino candidates detected by IceCube, and one and zero detected by ANTARES, within AE500 s around the respective gravitational wave signals, consistent with the expected background rate. None of these neutrino candidates are found to be directionally coincident with GW151226 or LVT151012. We use nondetection to constrain isotropic-equivalent high-energy neutrino emission from GW151226, adopting the GW event's 3D localization, to less than 2 × 10 51 -2 × 10 54 erg.

Highlights of the ANTARES neutrino telescope results

“…An upper limit of ~ 4 x 10 54 erg to the total neutrino emission, for a generic E -2 neutrino spectrum and for a spectrum with a high-energy cut off, has been obtained. This result is in agreement with what already derived for the previous events GW150914, LVT151012 and GW151226 [8,9].…”

Dirichlet Process Gaussian-mixture model: An application to localizing coalescing binary neutron stars with gravitational-wave observations

“…The source location is of paramount importance for identifying a multimessenger counterpart: both for targeting follow-up observations and for establishing that a candidate counterpart is associated with the gravitational-wave source. 1 Extensive electromagnetic and neutrino follow-up has been performed for the binary black hole detections (e.g., Abbott et al 2016f;Adrián-Martínez et al 2016;Albert et al 2017a), with no conclusive counterpart yet found. This is not surprising.…”

Bayesian multimessenger search method for common sources of gravitational waves and high-energy neutrinos

“…otherwise (23) For example, previous GW+neutrino searches used parameters t + gw = −t − gw = 250 s [9,15,23,[25][26][27]. We assume that the other source parameters are independent of t gw .…”

“…[30,31]), BNS mergers [32], neutron star-black hole mergers [33], soft gamma repeaters [34,35], and microquasars [11]. Besides these candidate sources, searches several searches were carried out to find the neutrino counterpart of GW discoveries [25][26][27]. A separate search was carried out to find joint events for which neither the GW nor the neutrino signal could be independently confirmed to be astrophysical [44].…”