{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/new-black-hole-mergers-in-the-ligo-virgo-o3","title":"New black hole mergers in the LIGO-Virgo O3 data from a gravitational wave search including higher-order harmonics","arxiv_id":"2312.06631","date":"2023-12-11","proceeding":null,"authors":["Digvijay Wadekar","Javier Roulet","Tejaswi Venumadhav","Ajit Kumar Mehta","Barak Zackay","Jonathan Mushkin","Seth Olsen","Matias Zaldarriaga"],"abstract":"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 $0.52\\leq p_\\mathrm{astro}\\leq 0.88$ (we use the detection threshold as the astrophysical probability, $p_\\mathrm{astro}$, 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 $\\sim$100 $M_\\odot$). 5 candidates have median mass ratio $q \\leq 0.5$. 5 candidates have median redshift $z \\geq 0.8$. 3 candidates have non-zero $\\chi_{\\rm eff}$ at $>95\\%$ credibility. While our new candidate events have modest false alarm rates ($\\gtrsim 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.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06631v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.06631v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"new-black-hole-mergers-in-the-ligo-virgo-o3","repo_url":"https://github.com/jaywadekar/gw_higher_harmonics_search","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}