Find the Gap: Black Hole Population Analysis with an Astrophysically Motivated Mass Function
Abstract
We introduce a novel black hole mass function which realistically models the physics of star formation and pair instability supernova with a minimal number of parameters. Applying this to all events in the LIGO-Virgo GWTC-2 catalog, we detect a peak at M_BHMG = 74.8^{+4.3}_{-8.0} MS, followed by a break in the mass function. Repeating the analysis without the black holes from the event GW190521, we find this feature at M_BHMG = 55.4^{+3.0}_{-6.1} MS. The latter result establishes the edge of the anticipated "black hole mass gap" at a value compatible with the expectation from standard stellar structure theory, while the former result is ~ 20MS higher, which would have far-reaching implications if confirmed. Using Bayesian techniques, we establish that our mass function fits a new catalog of black hole masses approximately as well as the pre-existing phenomenological mass functions. We also remark on the implications of these results for constraining or discovering new phenomena in nuclear and particle physics.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2104.02685,
title = {Find the Gap: Black Hole Population Analysis with an Astrophysically Motivated Mass Function},
author = {Eric J. Baxter and Djuna Croon and Samuel D. McDermott and Jeremy Sakstein},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.02685},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
6+7 pages; v2: updated analysis with increased evidence and changes to parameter values when applying our model to full dataset, matches version accepted in ApJL