Characterizing the Population of Binary Black Holes with Detections of Arbitrary Significance

ORAL

Abstract

In this talk I will describe a novel framework to characterize the population of binary black holes using detections of arbitrary significance. I will quantify the information gain from the inclusion of marginal events and introduce a theoretical bound on the information content of the astrophysical stochastic background, derived with this framework. I will report constraints on the distributions of merging binary black hole masses, spins and rate derived from detections from the first two LIGO-Virgo observing runs, including those identified by our group, and how these get updated with results from the recent third observing run.

*TV and LD acknowledge support by the John Bahcall Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2012086. BZ acknowledges the support of the Peter Svennilson Membership Fund and the Frank and Peggy Taplin membership fund. MZ is supported by NSF grants PHY-1820775 the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Program on Gravity and the Extreme Universe and the Simons Foundation Modern Inflationary Cosmology initiative.

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Authors

  • Javier Roulet

    • Princeton University

  • Tejaswi Venumadhav

    • University of California, Santa Barbara

  • Barak Zackay

    • Weizmann Institute of Science

  • Liang Dai

    • University of California, Berkeley

  • Matias Zaldarriaga

    • Institute for Advanced Study

  • Seth Olsen

    • Princeton University

  • Horng Sheng Chia

    • Institute for Advanced Study
    • Institute for Advanced Study (IAS)
    • Institute of Advanced Study