Gravitational wave burst search in the Virgo C7 data

Abstract

A search for gravitational wave burst events has been performed with the Virgo C7 commissioning run data that have been acquired in September 2005 over 5 days. It focused on unmodeled short duration signals in the frequency range 150 Hz to 2 kHz. A search aimed at detecting the GW emission from the merger and ring-down phases of binary black hole coalescences was also carried out. An extensive understanding of the data was required to be able to handle a burst search using the output of only one detector. A 90% confidence level upper limit on the number of expected events given the Virgo C7 sensitivity curve has been derived as a function of the signal strength, for unmodeled gravitational wave searches. The sensitivity of the analysis presented is, in terms of the root sum square strain amplitude, hrss ≃ 10−20 Hz−1/2. This can be interpreted in terms of a frequentist upper limit on the rate of detectable gravitational wave bursts at the level of 1.1 events per day at a 90% confidence level. From the binary black hole search, we obtained the distance reach at 50% and 90% efficiency as a function of the total mass of the final black hole. The maximal detection distance for non-spinning high and equal mass black hole binary system obtained by this analysis in C7 data is ≃2.9 ± 0.1 Mpc for a detection efficiency of 50% for a binary of total mass 80 M⊙.