Disentangling spinning and nonspinning binary black hole populations with spin sorting
ORAL
Abstract
The individual component spins of binary black holes (BBH) are difficult to resolve using gravitational-wave observations but carry key signatures of the processes shaping their formation and evolution. Recent analyses have found conflicting evidence for a sub-population of black holes with negligible spin, but the Default spin magnitude population model used in LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA analyses cannot formally accommodate an excess of systems with zero spin. In this talk, we present an analysis of simulated BBH populations which shows that, despite this mismodeling, spinning and nonspinning populations can still be reliably distinguished when using the Default spin magnitude population model coupled with spin sorting. We will demonstrate that current BBH observations are inconsistent with a fully nonspinning population, but could be explained by a population with only one spinning black hole per binary or a population with up to 80% nonspinning sources.
*This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. AST-2149425, a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) grant awarded to CIERA at Northwestern University and by NSF's LIGO Laboratory which is a major facility fully funded by the National Science Foundation. The work was also supported by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51524.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555.
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Publication: L. Szemraj, A.S. Biscoveanu, Disentangling Non-Spinning and Spinning Binary Black Hole Systems. Submitted to CQG August 2025, arXiv:2507.23663
Presenters
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Lillie Szemraj
- Princeton University