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

THE PIERRE AUGER COLLABORATION, INCLUYE S. MOLLERACH

PHYSICAL REVIEW D - PARTICLE AND FILDS

American Physical Society

Año: 2016

0556-2821

On September 14, 2015 the Advanced LIGO detectors observed their firstgravitational wave (GW) transient GW150914. This was followed by asecond GW event observed on December 26, 2015. Both events were inferredto have arisen from the merger of black holes in binary systems. Such asystem may emit neutrinos if there are magnetic fields and disk debrisremaining from the formation of the two black holes. With the surfacedetector array of the Pierre Auger Observatory we can search forneutrinos with energy Eν above 100 PeV from pointlikesources across the sky with equatorial declination from about -6 5 °to +6 0 ° , and, in particular, from a fraction of the 90%confidence-level inferred positions in the sky of GW150914 and GW151226.A targeted search for highly inclined extensive air showers, producedeither by interactions of downward-going neutrinos of all flavors in theatmosphere or by the decays of tau leptons originating from tau-neutrinointeractions in the Earth's crust (Earth-skimming neutrinos), yielded nocandidates in the Auger data collected within ±500 s around or 1day after the coordinated universal time (UTC) of GW150914 and GW151226,as well as in the same search periods relative to the UTC time of the GWcandidate event LVT151012. From the nonobservation we constrain theamount of energy radiated in ultrahigh-energy neutrinos from suchremarkable events.