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

THE PIERRE AUGER COLLABORATION (471 AUTHORS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER); GARCIA, B

PHYSICAL REVIEW D

AMER PHYSICAL SOC

Lugar: New York; Año: 2016 vol. 94 p. 1 - 10

1550-7998

P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }OnSeptember 14, 2015 the Advanced LIGO detectors observed their firstgravitational wave (GW) transientGW150914. This was followed by a second GW event observed on December26, 2015. Both eventswere inferred to have arisen from the merger of black holes in binarysystems. Such a system may emitneutrinos if there are magnetic fields and disk debris remaining fromthe formation of the two black holes.With the surface detector array of the Pierre Auger Observatory wecan search for neutrinos with energyEνabove100 PeV from pointlike sources across the sky with equatorialdeclination from about −65°to +60°,and, in particular, from a fraction of the 90% confidence-levelinferred positions in the sky of GW150914and GW151226. A targeted search for highly inclined extensive airshowers, produced either byinteractions of downward-going neutrinos of all flavors in theatmosphere or by the decays of tau leptons originatingfrom tau-neutrino interactions in the Earth?scrust (Earth-skimming neutrinos), yielded no candidatesin the Auger data collected within +/-500saround or 1 day after the coordinated universal time (UTC)of GW150914 and GW151226, as well as in the same search periodsrelative to the UTC time of the GWcandidate event LVT151012. From the nonobservation we constrain theamount of energy radiated in ultrahigh-energyneutrinos from such remarkable events.