Papers › Constraints on Binary Black Hole Populations from LIGO-Virgo Detections
Constraints on Binary Black Hole Populations from LIGO-Virgo Detections
Javier Roulet, Matias Zaldarriaga
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
We reanalyse the LIGO-Virgo strain data of the 10 binary black hole mergers reported to date and compute the likelihood function in terms of chirp mass, mass ratio and effective spin. We discuss the strong degeneracy between mass ratio and spin for the three lighter events. We use this likelihood and an estimate of the horizon volume as a function of intrinsic parameters to constrain the properties of the population of merging binary black holes. The data disfavour large spins. Typical spins are constrained to a ≲0.4, even if the underlying population has randomly-oriented spins. For aligned spins the constraints are tighter, with typical spins required to be around a∼0.1 and have comparable dispersion. We detect no statistically significant tendency towards a positive average spin in the direction of the orbital angular momentum. We put an upper limit on the fraction of systems where the secondary could have been tidally locked prior to the formation of the black holes (corresponding to merger times shorter than 10⁸ years) f ≲0.3. Four events are consistent with having a maximally-spinning secondary, although one only marginally. We confirm previous findings that there is a hint of a cutoff at high mass. The data favour distributions of mass ratios with an average q ≳0.7.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections