Speaker
Description
Nearly all of the previous gravitational wave (GW) searches in the LIGO-Virgo-Kagra (LVK) data include GW waveforms with only the dominant quadrupole mode, i.e., omitting higher-order harmonics such as the octupole which are predicted by general relativity. We improved our search pipeline by introducing higher harmonics in the GW templates, and downweighting noise transients (“glitches”) to improve the search sensitivity to high-mass binary black hole (BBH) mergers. We searched over the public LVK data from the third observing run (O3) and used the detection threshold as the astrophysical probability being over 0.5 (following the approach of the LVK catalogs). This led to the detection of 13 new BBH merger events. Some of the new events have interesting astrophysical properties such as populating the pair instability mass gap in the black hole (BH) mass distribution and high redshift. While our new events individually have modest false alarm rates (>~ 1/yr), combining all the 13 events with their respective pastro values could have an impact on population analysis studies (e.g., probing the evolution of mass and spin distribution of BHs with redshift).
