Ultrahigh-energy neutrino follow-up of gravitational wave events GW150914 and GW151226 with the Pierre Auger Observatory

H. WAHLBERG Y PIERRE AUGER COLLABORATION

PHYSICAL REVIEW D

AMER PHYSICAL SOC

Lugar: New York; Año: 2017

1550-7998

On September 14, 2015 the Advanced LIGO detectors observed their first gravitational-wave(GW) transient GW150914. This was followed by a second GW event observed on December 26,2015. Both events were inferred to have arisen from the merger of black holes in binary systems.Such a system may emit neutrinos if there are magnetic fields and disk debris remaining from theformation of the two black holes. With the surface detector array of the Pierre Auger Observatorywe can search for neutrinos with energy E ν above 100 PeV from point-like sources across the skywith equatorial declination from about −65 ◦ to +60 ◦ , and in particular from a fraction of the90% confidence-level (CL) inferred positions in the sky of GW150914 and GW151226. A targeted search for highly-inclined extensive air showers, produced either by interactions of downward-goingneutrinos of all flavors in the atmosphere or by the decays of tau leptons originating from tau-neutrino interactions in the Earth?s crust (Earth-skimming neutrinos), yielded no candidates in theAuger data collected within ±500 s around or 1 day after the coordinated universal time (UTC)of GW150914 and GW151226, as well as in the same search periods relative to the UTC time ofthe GW candidate event LVT151012. From the non-observation we constrain the amount of energyradiated in ultrahigh-energy neutrinos from such remarkable events.