Supplement: "The rate of binary black hole mergers inferred from advanced LIGO observations surrounding GW150914" (2016, ApJL, 833, L1)

Abstract

This article provides supplemental information for a Letter reporting the rate of (BBH) coalescences inferred from 16 days of coincident Advanced LIGO observations surrounding the transient (GW) signal GW150914. In that work we reported various rate estimates whose 90% confidence intervals fell in the range 2–600 Gpc¯³ yr¯¹. Here we give details on our method and computations, including information about our search pipelines, a derivation of our likelihood function for the analysis, a description of the astrophysical search trigger distribution expected from merging BBHs, details on our computational methods, a description of the effects and our model for calibration uncertainty, and an analytic method for estimating our detector sensitivity, which is calibrated to our measurements.