Prospects for intermediate mass black hole binary searches with advanced gravitational-wave detectors

We estimated the sensitivity of the upcoming advanced ground-based gravitational-wave observatories (the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA interferometers) to coalescing intermediate mass black hole binaries (IMBHB). We added waveforms modeling the gravitational radiation emitted by IMBHBs to simulated data from detectors and searched for the injected signals with the coherent WaveBurst algorithm. The tested parameter space of the binaries covers nonspinning IMBHBs with source-frame total masses between 50 and $1050{\mathrm{M}}_{\ensuremath{\bigodot}}$ and mass ratios between $1/6$ and 1. We found that advanced detectors could be sensitive to these systems up to a range of a few Gpc. A theoretical model was adopted to estimate the expected observation rates, yielding up to a few tens of events per year. Thus, our results indicate that advanced detectors will have a reasonable chance to collect the first direct evidence for intermediate mass black holes and to open a new, intriguing channel for probing the Universe over cosmological scales.