Gravitational wave constraints on planetary-mass primordial black holes using LIGO O3a data

Gravitational waves from sub-solar mass inspiraling compact objects would provide smoking-gun evidence for primordial black holes (PBHs). We perform the first search for inspiraling planetary-mass PBHs, both in equal-mass or asymmetric mass ratio binaries, using data from the first half of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA third observing run. We do not find any significant candidates, but determine the maximum luminosity distance reachable with our search to be of O(0.1-100) kpc, and corresponding model-independent upper limits on the merger rate densities to be O(10^3-10^-7) kpc^-3yr^-1 for systems with chirp masses O(10^-4-10^-2)M_⊙, respectively. Furthermore, we interpret these rate densities as arising from PBH binaries, and thereby constrain the fraction of dark matter that these objects could compose. For equal-mass PBH binaries, we find f_PBH< [1, 0.04] for m_PBH∈ [2× 10^-3,10^-2]M_⊙, respectively. For asymmetric mass-ratio binaries, where m_1=2.5M_⊙ and m_2≪ m_1, we constrain the mass function f(m_2)<1 for m_2∈ [1.5×10^-5,2×10^-4]M_⊙, assuming f_PBH=0.1 and f(m_1)∼ 1. Our results constitute the first gravitational-wave constraints on planetary-mass PBHs in both equal-mass and highly asymmetric mass-ratio systems, provide a computationally efficient alternative to matched filtering in this mass regime, and complement microlensing experiments to probe the existence of these objects. The data necessary to produce the upper limit plots has also been released on Zenodo.