We apply a newly-developed On-the-Fly mosaicing technique on the NSF's Karl
G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) at 3 GHz in order to carry out a sensitive
search for an afterglow from the Advanced LIGO binary black hole merger event
GW 151226. In three epochs between 1.5 and 6 months post-merger we observed a
100 sq. deg region, with more than 80% of the survey region having a RMS
sensitivity of better than 150 uJy/beam, in the northern hemisphere having a
merger containment probability of 10%. The data were processed in
near-real-time, and analyzed to search for transients and variables. No
transients were found but we have demonstrated the ability to conduct blind
searches in a time-frequency phase space where the predicted afterglow signals
are strongest. If the gravitational wave event is contained within our survey
region, the upper limit on any late-time radio afterglow from the merger event
at an assumed mean distance of 440 Mpc is about 1e29 erg/s/Hz. Approximately
1.5% of the radio sources in the field showed variability at a level of 30%,
and can be attributed to normal activity from active galactic nuclei. The low
rate of false positives in the radio sky suggests that wide-field imaging
searches at a few Gigahertz can be an efficient and competitive search
strategy. We discuss our search method in the context of the recent afterglow
detection from GW 170817 and radio follow-up in future gravitational wave
observing runs.Comment: 11 pages. 6 figures. 1 table. Accepted for publication in ApJ Letter
