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  1. ABSTRACT

    The global network of interferometric gravitational wave (GW) observatories (LIGO, Virgo, KAGRA) has detected and characterized nearly 100 mergers of binary compact objects. However, many more real GWs are lurking sub-threshold, which need to be sifted from terrestrial-origin noise triggers (known as glitches). Because glitches are not due to astrophysical phenomena, inference on the glitch under the assumption it has an astrophysical source (e.g. binary black hole coalescence) results in source parameters that are inconsistent with what is known about the astrophysical population. In this work, we show how one can extract unbiased population constraints from a catalogue of both real GW events and glitch contaminants by performing Bayesian inference on their source populations simultaneously. In this paper, we assume glitches come from a specific class with a well-characterized effective population (blip glitches). We also calculate posteriors on the probability of each event in the catalogue belonging to the astrophysical or glitch class, and obtain posteriors on the number of astrophysical events in the catalogue, finding it to be consistent with the actual number of events included.

     
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  2. ABSTRACT

    Neutron star–black hole (NSBH) mergers detected in gravitational waves have the potential to shed light on supernova physics, the dense matter equation of state, and the astrophysical processes that power their potential electromagnetic counterparts. We use the population of four candidate NSBH events detected in gravitational waves so far with a false alarm rate ≤1 yr−1 to constrain the mass and spin distributions and multimessenger prospects of these systems. We find that the black holes in NSBHs are both less massive and have smaller dimensionless spins than those in black hole binaries. We also find evidence for a mass gap between the most massive neutron stars and least massive black holes in NSBHs at 98.6-per cent credibility. Using an approach driven by gravitational-wave data rather than binary simulations, we find that fewer than 14 per cent of NSBH mergers detectable in gravitational waves will have an electromagnetic counterpart. While the inferred presence of a mass gap and fraction of sources with a counterpart depend on the event selection and prior knowledge of source classification, the conclusion that the black holes in NSBHs have lower masses and smaller spin parameters than those in black hole binaries is robust. Finally, we propose a method for the multimessenger analysis of NSBH mergers based on the non-detection of an electromagnetic counterpart and conclude that, even in the most optimistic case, the constraints on the neutron star equation of state that can be obtained with multimessenger NSBH detections are not competitive with those from gravitational-wave measurements of tides in binary neutron star mergers and radio and X-ray pulsar observations.

     
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  3. Abstract

    The population-level distributions of the masses, spins, and redshifts of binary black holes (BBHs) observed using gravitational waves can shed light on how these systems form and evolve. Because of the complex astrophysical processes shaping the inferred BBH population, models allowing for correlations among these parameters will be necessary to fully characterize these sources. We hierarchically analyze the BBH population detected by LIGO and Virgo with a model allowing for correlations between the effective aligned spin and the primary mass and redshift. We find that the width of the effective spin distribution grows with redshift at 98.6% credibility. We determine this trend to be robust under the application of several alternative models and additionally verify that such a correlation is unlikely to be spuriously introduced using a simulated population. We discuss the possibility that this correlation could be due to a change in the natal black hole spin distribution with redshift.

     
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  4. Context. The growing set of gravitational-wave sources is being used to measure the properties of the underlying astrophysical populations of compact objects, black holes, and neutron stars. Most of the detected systems are black hole binaries. While much has been learned about black holes by analyzing the latest LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) catalog, GWTC-3, a measurement of the astrophysical distribution of the black hole spin orientations remains elusive. This is usually probed by measuring the cosine of the tilt angle (cos τ ) between each black hole spin and the orbital angular momentum, with cos τ  = +1 being perfect alignment. Aims. The LVK Collaboration has modeled the cos τ distribution as a mixture of an isotropic component and a Gaussian component with mean fixed at +1 and width measured from the data. We want to verify if the data require the existence of such a peak at cos τ  = +1. Methods. We used various alternative models for the astrophysical tilt distribution and measured their parameters using the LVK GWTC-3 catalog. Results. We find that (a) augmenting the LVK model, such that the mean μ of the Gaussian is not fixed at +1, returns results that strongly depend on priors. If we allow μ  >  +1, then the resulting astrophysical cos τ distribution peaks at +1 and looks linear, rather than Gaussian. If we constrain −1 ≤  μ  ≤ +1, the Gaussian component peaks at μ  = 0.48 −0.99 +0.46 (median and 90% symmetric credible interval). Two other two-component mixture models yield cos τ distributions that either have a broad peak centered at 0.19 −0.18 +0.22 or a plateau that spans the range [ − 0.5, +1], without a clear peak at +1. (b) All of the models we considered agree as to there being no excess of black hole tilts at around −1. (c) While yielding quite different posteriors, the models considered in this work have Bayesian evidences that are the same within error bars. Conclusions. We conclude that the current dataset is not sufficiently informative to draw any model-independent conclusions on the astrophysical distribution of spin tilts, except that there is no excess of spins with negatively aligned tilts. 
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