Searching for gravitational waves from the coalescence of high mass black hole binaries

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Abstract:: GstLAL is a search pipeline used by LIGO to search for gravitational waves from the coalescence of compact binaries (neutron stars and/or black holes), which can be operated in on-line and/or off-line configuration. Currently, the parameter space covered by GstLAL consists of binaries with component masses m1, m2 ≥ 1M⊙ (M⊙ is the solar mass) and total mass 2M⊙ ≤ m1 + m2 ≤ 100M⊙. In this project, we aim to increase the upper bound of the total mass to 600M⊙ by including intermediate mass black holes (IMBH) region into the parameter space. Simulated signal injections with real noises were used to evaluate the sensitivity of GstLAL when decreasing the lower frequency cut-off so as to observe signals from IMBH. Also, the drop in performance of the search pipeline was measured as we added more templates in the IMBH region and we experimented various techniques such as different bank splitting and h(t) gating schemes to increase the performance and sensitivity. This would enable us to detect more gravitational wave signals from the coalescence of black holes with higher masses in real time gravitational wave detection.

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LIGO Document G1601642-v1