Papers › Searching for intermediate mass ratio binary black hole mergers in the third observing...
Searching for intermediate mass ratio binary black hole mergers in the third observing run of LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA
Mark Ho-Yeuk Cheung, Digvijay Wadekar, Ajit Kumar Mehta, Tousif Islam, Javier Roulet, Emanuele Berti, Tejaswi Venumadhav, Barak Zackay, 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.
Intermediate mass ratio inspirals (IMRIs) of binary black holes with mass ratios 10⁻⁴≲q ≲0.1 are astrophysically interesting sources of gravitational waves. Mergers of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) with stellar-mass black holes would be IMRIs, so their detection can help us probe the formation mechanisms of IMBHs. They can also help us perform precise tests of general relativity due to the presence of strong higher-order mode emission. We perform a search for aligned-spin IMRIs within the data of the two LIGO detectors in the third observing run (O3) of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) collaboration, including higher modes in the template banks for the first time. We use the IAS-HM pipeline for our search and construct template banks in the range 1/100 < q<1/18 using the SEOBNRv5HM waveform model. Our banks retain a similar level of effectualness for IMRPhenomXHM and BHPTNRSur2dq1e3 waveforms, making our search results relatively robust against waveform systematics. We show that the sensitivity volume of the search increases by up to ∼500% upon inclusion of higher modes. We do not find any significant candidates with inverse false alarm rate (IFAR) > 1 year in the O3 data. This gives us upper limits on the IMRI merger rate in the local Universe, ranging from ∼30 to 10³ Gpc⁻³ yr⁻¹ depending on the masses of the black holes in the binary. These constraints are consistent with rate predictions in the literature. Our projections indicate that we would be able to detect IMRIs or constrain some of their proposed formation channels in the fourth (O4) and fifth (O5) observing runs.
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