Search for Postmerger Gravitational Waves from Binary Neutron Star Mergers Using a Matched-filtering Statistic

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new method to search for a short, a few tens of milliseconds long, postmerger gravitational-wave signal following the merger of two neutron stars. Such a signal could follow the event GW170817 observed by LIGO and Virgo detectors. Our method is based on a matched filtering statistic and an approximate template of the postmerger signal in the form of a damped sinusoid. We test and validate our method using postmerger numerical simulations from the CoRe database. We find no evidence of the short postmerger signal in the LIGO data following the GW170817 event and we obtain upper limits. For short postmerger signals investigated, our best upper limit on the root sum square of the gravitational-wave strain emitted from 1.15 kHz to 4 kHz is $h_{\text{rss}}^{50\%}=1.8\times 10^{-22}/\sqrt{\text{Hz}}$ at 50% detection efficiency. The distance corresponding to this best upper limit is 4.64 Mpc.