New binary black hole mergers in the LIGO-Virgo O3b data

Creators: Mehta, Ajit Kumar¹; Olsen, Seth²; Wadekar, Digvijay³; Roulet, Javier⁴; Venumadhav, Tejaswi¹; Mushkin, Jonathan⁵; Zackay, Barak⁵; Zaldarriaga, Matias³

1. University of California, Santa Barbara
2. Princeton University
3. Institute for Advanced Study
4. California Institute of Technology
5. Weizmann Institute of Science

Abstract

We report the detection of six new candidate binary black hole (BBH) merger signals in the publicly released data from the second half of the third observing run (O3b) of advanced LIGO and advanced Virgo. The LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration reported 35 compact binary coalescences in their analysis of the O3b data [Phys. Rev. X 13, 041039 (2023).], with 30 BBH mergers having coincidence in the Hanford and Livingston detectors. We confirm 17 of these for a total of 23 detections in our analysis of the Hanford–Livingston coincident O3b data. We identify candidates using a search pipeline employing aligned-spin quadrupole-only waveforms. Our pipeline is similar to the one used in our O3a coincident analysis [Phys. Rev. D 106, 043009 (2022).], except for a few improvements in the veto procedure and the ranking statistic, and we continue to use an astrophysical probability of one half as our detection threshold, following the approach of the LVK catalogs. Most of the new candidates reported in this work are placed in the upper/lower-mass gap of the black hole mass distribution. We also identify a possible neutron star-black hole merger. We expect these events to help inform the black hole mass and spin distributions inferred in a full population analysis.

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Acknowledgement

We thank Horng Sheng Chia and Katerina Chatziioannou for helpful discussions. D. W. gratefully acknowledges support from the Friends of the Institute for Advanced Study Membership and the Keck foundation. T. V. acknowledges support from NSF Grants No. 2012086 and No. 2309360, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation through Grant No. FG-2023-20470, the BSF through Award No. 2022136, and the Hellman Family Faculty Fellowship. B. Z. is supported by the Israel Science Foundation, NSF-BSF, and by a research grant from the Willner Family Leadership Institute for the Weizmann Institute of Science. M. Z. is supported by NSF 2209991 and NSF-BSF 2207583. This research was also supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. NSF PHY-1748958. We also thank ICTS-TIFR for their hospitality during the completion of a part of this work. This research has made use of data, software and/or web tools obtained from the Gravitational Wave Open Science Center [91], a service of LIGO Laboratory, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and the Virgo Collaboration. LIGO Laboratory and Advanced LIGO are funded by the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) as well as the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) of the United Kingdom, the Max-Planck-Society (MPS), and the State of Niedersachsen/Germany for support of the construction of Advanced LIGO and construction and operation of the GEO600 detector. Additional support for Advanced LIGO was provided by the Australian Research Council. Virgo is funded, through the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO), by the French Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), and the Dutch Nikhef, with contributions by institutions from Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Monaco, Poland, Portugal, and Spain.

Data Availability

The data that support the findings of this article are openly available [58].

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