Papers › New black hole mergers in the LIGO-Virgo O3 data from a gravitational wave search...
New black hole mergers in the LIGO-Virgo O3 data from a gravitational wave search including higher-order harmonics
Digvijay Wadekar, Javier Roulet, Tejaswi Venumadhav, Ajit Kumar Mehta, Barak Zackay, Jonathan Mushkin, Seth Olsen, 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.
Nearly all of the previous gravitational wave (GW) searches in the LIGO-Virgo data included GW waveforms with only the dominant quadrupole harmonic, i.e., omitting higher-order harmonics which are predicted by general relativity. We improved the IAS pipeline by efficiently introducing higher harmonics in the GW templates using the techniques in Wadekar et al. [1, 2]. Using the IAS-HM pipeline on the public LIGO-Virgo data from the O3 run, we find 11 new candidate BBH mergers with 0.52≤pₐₛₜᵣₒ≤0.88 (we use the detection threshold as the astrophysical probability, pₐₛₜᵣₒ, being over 0.5, following the approach of other pipelines). We broadly recover the high-significance events from earlier catalogs, except a few which were vetoed. We also find that including higher harmonics in our search raises the significance of a few previously reported marginal events (e.g., GW190711_030756). A few notable properties of our new candidate events are as follows. At >95% credibility, 4 candidates have primary masses in the intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) range (i.e., above ∼100 M_⊙). 5 candidates have median mass ratio q ≤0.5. 5 candidates have median redshift z ≥0.8. 3 candidates have non-zero χ_(eff) at >95% credibility. While our new candidate events have modest false alarm rates (≳1.5/yr), a population inference study including these can better inform the parameter space of BHs corresponding to the pair instability mass gap, high redshifts and asymmetric mass ratios.
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