Searching for asymmetric and heavily precessing Binary Black Holes in the gravitational wave data from the LIGO and Virgo third Observing Run

Stefano Schmidt; Sarah Caudill; Jolien D. E. Creighton; Leo Tsukada; Anarya Ray; Shomik Adhicary; Pratyusava Baral; Amanda Baylor; Kipp Cannon; Bryce Cousins; Becca Ewing; Heather Fong; Richard N. George; Patrick Godwin; Chad Hanna; Reiko Harada; Yun-Jing Huang; Rachael Huxford; Prathamesh Joshi; James Kennington; Soichiro Kuwahara; Alvin K. Y. Li; Ryan Magee; Duncan Meacher; Cody Messick; Soichiro Morisaki; Debnandini Mukherjee; Wanting Niu; Alex Pace; Cort Posnansky; Surabhi Sachdev; Shio Sakon; Divya Singh; Urja Shah; Ron Tapia; Takuya Tsutsui; Koh Ueno; Aaron Viets; Leslie Wade; Madeline Wade

arXiv · 2406.17832

Searching for asymmetric and heavily precessing Binary Black Holes in the gravitational wave data from the LIGO and Virgo third Observing Run

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Leveraging the features of the GstLAL pipeline, we present the results of a matched filtering search for asymmetric binary black hole systems with heavily misaligned spins in LIGO and Virgo data taken during the third observing run. Our target systems show strong imprints of precession whereas current searches have non-optimal sensitivity in detecting them. After measuring the sensitivity improvement brought by our search over standard spin-aligned searches, we report the detection of 30 gravitational wave events already discovered in the latest version of the Gravitational Wave Transient Catalog. However, we do not find any additional significant gravitational wave candidates. Our results allow us to place an upper limit of $R_{90\%} = 0.28^{+0.33}_{-0.04}\;\; \mathrm{Gpc^{-3}yr^{-1}}$ on the merger rate of a hypothetical subpopulation of asymmetric, heavily precessing signals, not identified by other searches. Since our upper limit is consistent with the latest rate estimates from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, our findings rule out the existence of a yet-to-be-discovered population of precessing binaries.

Explore related subjects

gr-qc

Keep this discovery

BibTeX RIS

Stefano Schmidt, Sarah Caudill, Jolien D. E. Creighton, Leo Tsukada, Anarya Ray, Shomik Adhicary, Pratyusava Baral, Amanda Baylor, Kipp Cannon, Bryce Cousins, Becca Ewing, Heather Fong, Richard N. George, Patrick Godwin, Chad Hanna, Reiko Harada, Yun-Jing Huang, Rachael Huxford, Prathamesh Joshi, James Kennington, Soichiro Kuwahara, Alvin K. Y. Li, Ryan Magee, Duncan Meacher, Cody Messick, Soichiro Morisaki, Debnandini Mukherjee, Wanting Niu, Alex Pace, Cort Posnansky, Surabhi Sachdev, Shio Sakon, Divya Singh, Urja Shah, Ron Tapia, Takuya Tsutsui, Koh Ueno, Aaron Viets, Leslie Wade, Madeline Wade. 2024-06-25. Searching for asymmetric and heavily precessing Binary Black Holes in the gravitational wave data from the LIGO and Virgo third Observing Run. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.17832

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Electrovacuum Black Hole Uniqueness

We prove the black hole uniqueness conjecture in the axially symmetric, stationary, electrovacuum setting, subject to the refined asymptotic analysis of the associated singular harmonic maps, which includes an analyticity hypothesis at the axes. More precisely, it is shown that any asymptotically flat solution of the Einstein--Maxwell equations in this class, with more than one black hole horizon component is either: Majumdar--Papapetrou, up to a duality rotation, in which case all logarithmic angle defects vanish, or every finite axis rod logarithmic angle defect is strictly negative and hence every interaction force is strictly attractive. The proof extends the singular harmonic map method used for vacuum Kerr uniqueness in [18].

gr-qc↗

arXiv2026

Constraining Modified Mass-to-Horizon Cosmology Through Primordial Inflationary Observables

We investigate slow-roll inflation in a modified cosmological framework inspired by a generalized mass-to-horizon relation (MHR), $M=\gamma {c^2 L^n}/{G}$, where $n$ is a real parameter and $\gamma$ a dimensional constant. Using Padmanabhan's emergence paradigm, we derive the modified Friedmann equations for a flat FRW universe and analyze the dynamics of a canonical scalar field (inflaton) under the slow-roll approximation. We study the resulting inflationary phenomenology for power-law and Starobinsky potentials. For power-law potentials, the MHR modification fails to reconcile these models with current CMB constraints on $r$ and $n_s$. In contrast, Starobinsky inflation exhibits significant sensitivity to deviations from $n=1$. A perturbative analysis ($n=1+\Delta$) yields corrections to inflationary observables. We observe that the scalar power-spectrum normalization, under a fixed-Starobinsky prescription, imposes the stringent constraint $0.960 \lesssim n \lesssim 1.040$ for $N=60$ efolds. This is considerably tighter than spectral-index bounds. Our results establish inflation, particularly Starobinsky-like models, as a sensitive probe of generalized horizon thermodynamics and departures from standard MHR scaling.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2026

Improving the Sensitivity of Gravitational Wave Detection with Weighted Conformal Prediction

In the last decade, kilometre-scale interferometric gravitational-wave detectors have observed hundreds of compact binary mergers, the majority of which are binary black holes. However, the data are noise-dominated, and multiple independent search algorithms (pipelines) are used to enhance sensitivity and improve robustness. Rather than the standard approach of selecting the most significant pipeline output, we combine the outputs from all pipelines using a conformal prediction-based framework to provide statistically rigorous confidence estimates for candidate events. While combining pipelines improves sensitivity and ranking robustness, it requires a principled statistical framework that remains valid as data properties evolve across observing runs. A key challenge is distribution shifts between simulated datasets used for training and calibration and the real, unlabelled, observations used for testing, which can invalidate coverage guarantees and bias confidence estimates. In this work, we address this challenge by incorporating likelihood-ratio reweighting into our conformal prediction framework to account for covariate shift. Using mock datasets containing simulated signals, we demonstrate that weighted conformal prediction restores well-calibrated coverage under covariate shift and increases the confidence of events near the detection threshold, recovering true signals that would otherwise be missed.

gr-qc↗