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

THE PIERRE AUGER COLLABORATION (P HANSEN PERTENECE A LA COLABORACIÓN AUGER)

PHYSICAL REVIEW D

AMER PHYSICAL SOC

Lugar: New York; Año: 2016 vol. 94 p. 122007 - 122012

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. Bothevents were inferred to have arisen from the merger of black holes in binary systems. Such a system mayemit neutrinos if there are magnetic fields and disk debris remaining from the formation of the two blackholes. With the surface detector array of the Pierre Auger Observatory we can search for neutrinos withenergy Eν above 100 PeV from pointlike sources across the sky with equatorial declination from about−65° to þ60°, and, in particular, from a fraction of the 90% confidence-level inferred positions in the sky ofGW150914 and GW151226. A targeted search for highly inclined extensive air showers, produced eitherby interactions of downward-going neutrinos of all flavors in the atmosphere or by the decays of tau leptonsoriginating from tau-neutrino interactions in the Earth?s crust (Earth-skimming neutrinos), yielded nocandidates in the Auger 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 of theGW candidate event LVT151012. From the nonobservation we constrain the amount of energy radiated inultrahigh-energy neutrinos from such remarkable events.