English

Parameter estimation for black hole echo signals and their statistical significance

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2019-05-15 v2

Abstract

Searching for black hole echo signals with gravitational waves provides a means of probing the near-horizon regime of these objects. We demonstrate a pipeline to efficiently search for these signals in gravitational wave data and calculate model selection probabilities between signal and no-signal hypotheses. As an example of its use we calculate Bayes factors for the Abedi-Dykaar-Afshordi (ADA) model on events in LIGO's first observing run and compare to existing results in the literature. We discuss the benefits of using a full likelihood exploration over existing search methods that used template banks and calculated p-values. We use the waveforms of ADA, although the method is easily extendable to other waveforms. With these waveforms we are able to demonstrate a range of echo amplitudes that is already is ruled out by the data.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1811.04904,
  title  = {Parameter estimation for black hole echo signals and their statistical significance},
  author = {Alex B. Nielsen and Collin D. Capano and Ofek Birnholtz and Julian Westerweck},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.04904},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

7 pages, 5 figures. Typo fixes and references added in v2

R2 v1 2026-06-23T05:13:02.114Z