Searching for double-peak and doubly broken gravitational-wave spectra from Advanced LIGO-Virgo's first three observing runs

The current LIGO-Virgo observing run has been pushing the sensitivity limit to touch the stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds (SGWBs). However, no significant detection has been reported to date for any single dominated source of SGWBs with a single broken-power-law (BPL) spectrum. Nevertheless, it could equally well escape from existing Bayesian searches from, for example, two comparable dominated sources with two separate BPL spectra (double-peak case) or a single source with its power-law behavior in the spectrum broken twice (doubly broken case). In this paper, we put constraints on these two cases but specifically for the model with cosmological first-order phase transitions from Advanced LIGO-Virgo’s first three observing runs. We found strong negative evidence for the double-peak case and hence place 95% C.L. upper limits ${\mathrm{\Omega }}_{\mathrm{B}\mathrm{P}\mathrm{L},1}<5.8\times {10}^{-8}$ and ${\mathrm{\Omega }}_{\mathrm{B}\mathrm{P}\mathrm{L},2}<4.4\times {10}^{-8}$ on the two BPL spectra amplitudes with respect to the unresolved compact binary coalescence (CBC) amplitude ${\mathrm{\Omega }}_{\mathrm{C}\mathrm{B}\mathrm{C}}<5.6\times {10}^{-9}$. We further found weak negative evidence for the doubly broken case and hence place 95% C.L. upper limit ${\mathrm{\Omega }}_{\mathrm{D}\mathrm{B}}<1.2\times {10}^{-7}$ on the overall amplitude of the doubly broken spectrum with respect to ${\mathrm{\Omega }}_{\mathrm{C}\mathrm{B}\mathrm{C}}<6.0\times {10}^{-9}$. In particular, the results from the double-peak case have marginally ruled out the strong super-cooling first-order phase transitions at LIGO-Virgo band.