Related papers: Are stellar--mass binary black hole mergers isotro…
The recent advanced LIGO detections of gravitational waves from merging binary black holes enhance the prospect of exploring binary evolution via gravitational-wave observations of a population of compact-object binaries. In the face of…
The distribution of effective spin $\chi_{\rm eff}$, a parameter that encodes the degree of spin-orbit alignment in a binary system, has been widely regarded as a robust discriminator between the isolated and dynamical formation pathways…
Templates modeling just the dominant mode of gravitational radiation are generally sufficient for the unbiased parameter inference of near-equal-mass compact binary mergers. However, neglecting the subdominant modes can bias the inference…
Over a hundred gravitational-wave (GW) detections and candidates have been reported from the first three observing runs of the Advanced LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) detectors. Among these, the most intriguing events are binary black hole mergers…
We present the results from three gravitational-wave searches for coalescing compact binaries with component masses above 1$\mathrm{M}_\odot$ during the first and second observing runs of the Advanced gravitational-wave detector network.…
Double black hole binaries are among the most important sources of gravitational radiation for ground-based detectors such as LIGO or VIRGO. Even if formed with lower efficiency than double neutron star binaries, they could dominate the…
Black hole population studies are currently performed either using astrophysically motivated models (informed but rigid in their functional forms) or via non-parametric methods (flexible but not directly interpretable). In this paper, we…
Advanced LIGO and Virgo detected ten binary black holes (BBHs) in their first two observing runs (O1 and O2). Analysis of these events found strong evidence for a dearth of BBHs with component masses greater than $\sim45 \ M_\odot$, as…
It is expected that the orbital planes of gravitational-wave (GW) sources are isotropically distributed. However, both physical and technical factors, such as alternate theories of gravity with birefringence, catalog contamination, and…
While the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA (LVK) gravitational wave (GW) detectors have detected over 300 binary black hole (BBH) mergers to date, the first confirmation of an electromagnetic (EM) counterpart to such an event remains elusive. Previous…
Advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors reported the first binary neutron star merger candidate in the third observing run, S190425z, on 25th April 2019. A weak $\gamma$-ray excess was reported nearly coincidentally by the INTEGRAL satellite…
Black hole mergers detectable with LIGO can occur in active galactic nucleus (AGN) disks. Here we parameterize the merger rates, the mass spectrum and the spin spectrum of black holes (BH) in AGN disks. The predicted merger rate spans $\sim…
The LIGO/Virgo collaboration has by now observed or constrained the gravitational merger rates of different classes of compact objects. We consider the possibility that the bulk of these mergers are primordial black hole (PBH) mergers of…
Motivated by the preponderance of so-called "heavy black holes" in the binary black hole (BBH) gravitational wave (GW) detections to date, and the role that gravitational lensing continues to play in discovering new galaxy populations, we…
Up to now several gravitational-wave events from the coalescences of black hole binaries have been reported by LIGO/VIRGO, and imply that black holes should have an extended mass function. We work out the merger rate distribution of…
Observations by LIGO--Virgo of binary black hole mergers suggest a possible anti-correlation between black hole mass ratio ($q=m_{2}/m_{1}$) and the effective inspiral spin parameter $\chi_{\rm eff}$, the mass-weighted spin projection onto…
The initial discovery of LIGO on 14 September 2015 was the inspiral merger and ring-down of the black hole binary at a distance of about 500~Mpc or a redshift of about 0.1. The search for electromagnetic counterparts for the inspiral of…
The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaborations have reported gravitational wave signals from more than 150 binary black holes in the fourth catalog (GWTC-4). Here, we investigate the population properties of these binary black holes using the…
The recent discovery of GW150914, the binary black hole merger detected by Advanced LIGO, has the potential to revolutionize observational astrophysics. But to fully utilize this new window into the universe, we must compare these new…
The LIGO/Virgo collaboration has recently announced the detection of a heavy binary black hole merger, with component masses that cannot be explained by standard stellar structure theory. In this letter we propose several explanations based…