LIGO Document P2600230-v9
- We report on a gravitational wave search for compact binary coalescences with secondary mass between 0.2 Msun and 1 Msun and primary mass between 0.2 Msun and 10 Msun, restricting the component mass ratio to lie between 0.1 and 1.
The analysis uses data collected by the LIGO and Virgo detectors between 2024 April 10 15:00:00 and 2025 January 28 17:00:00, the second part of the fourth observing run of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration. Results from two out of three search pipelines show outlier candidates, but not at a sufficient level of significance to provide evidence for detection. We report the combined sensitivity of the current searches over the first and second parts of the observing run to the target sub-solar mass black hole population, as well as to neutron star binaries with one or more sub-solar component. We place upper limits on the merger rate of sub-solar mass black holes, ranging from 50 Gpc^-3 yr^-1 to 5000 Gpc^-3 yr^-1 (90% confidence) for different component mass combinations. Using these limits, we constrain two illustrative dark matter scenarios that can form sub-solar mass compact objects: primordial black holes, and dark black holes forming in a dissipative dark matter model. Our search limits the fraction of dark matter in primordial black holes, assuming a monochromatic mass distribution, to be \( \leq \)(0.018--0.032) at 1 Msun, and \( \leq \)(0.10--0.18) at 0.35 Msun for early-forming binaries; or to be less than 1 at masses above (0.62--0.74) Msun for late-forming binaries. For the dissipative model, we constrain the fraction of dark matter for a range of minimum dark black hole masses below 1 Msun to be as low as (1.0--1.1) \( \times 10^{-5} \); we also exclude minimum masses above (4.2--4.4) \( \times 10^{-2} \) Msun if dark black holes constitute all of the dark matter. For binary neutron stars that include sub-solar mass components, assuming a simple, fixed population model we find a merger rate upper limit of 249 Gpc^-3 yr^-1.
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