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This material is based upon work supported by NSF's LIGO Laboratory which is a major facility fully funded by the National Science Foundation. The authors also grate-fully acknowledge the support of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) of the United Kingdom, the Max-Planck-Society, and the State of Niedersachsen/Germany for support of the construction of Advanced LIGO and construction and operation of the GEO600 detector. Additional support for Advanced LIGO was provided by the Australian Research Council. The authors gratefully acknowledge the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research for the construction and operation of the Virgo detector and the creation and support of the EGO consortium. The authors also gratefully acknowledge research support from these agencies as well as by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research of India, the Department of Science and Technology, India, the Science & Engineering Research Board, India, the Ministry of Human Resource Development, India, the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigacion, the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion and Ministerio de Universidades, the Conselleria de Fons Europeus, Universitat i Cultura and the Direccio General de Politica Universitaria i Recerca del Govern de les Illes Balears, the Conselleria d'Innovacio, Universitats, Ciencia i Societat Digital de la Generalitat Valenciana and the CERCA Programme Generalitat de Catalunya, Spain, the National Science Centre of Poland and the European Union-European Regional Development Fund; Foundation for Polish Science, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, the Russian Science Foundation, the European Commission, the European Social Funds, the European Regional Development Funds, the Royal Society, the Scottish Funding Council, the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance, the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund, the French Lyon Institute of Origins, the Belgian Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique, Actions de Recherche Concertees and Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek-Vlaanderen, Belgium, the Paris Ile-de-France Region, the National Research, Development and Innovation Office Hungary, the National Research Foundation of Korea, the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council Canada, Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovations, the International Center for Theoretical Physics South American Institute for Fundamental Research, the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Leverhulme Trust, the Research Corporation, the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, the United States Department of Energy, and the Kavli Foundation. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the NSF, STFC, INFN, and CNRS for provision of computational resources. This work was supported by MEXT, JSPS Leading-Edge Research Infrastructure Program, JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Specially Promoted Research, Grant No. 26000005, JSPS Grant-in -Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas 2905, Grants No. JP17H06358, No. JP17H06361, and No. JP17H06364, JSPS Core-to-Core Program A. Advanced Research Networks, JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S), Grants No. 17H06133 and No. 20H05639, JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Transformative Research Areas (A) 20A203, Grant No.JP20H05854, the joint research program of the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, University of Tokyo, National Research Foundation and Computing Infrastructure Project of KISTI-GSDC in Korea, Academia Sinica (AS), AS Grid Center and the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan under grants including Grant No. AS-CDA-105-M06, Advanced Technology Center of NAOJ, Mechanical Engineering Center of KEK.

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Population of merging compact binaries inferred using gravitational waves through GWTC-3

Publicated to:Physical Review X. 13 (1): e011048- - 2023-03-29 13(1), DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.13.011048

Authors: Abbott, R.; Abbott, T.D.; AcTrnese, F.; Ackley, K.; Adams, C.; Adhikari, N.; Adhikari, R.X.; Adya, V.B.; Affeldt, C.; Agarwal, D.; Agathos, M.; Agatsuma, K.; Aggarwal, N.; Aguiar, O.D.; Aiello, L.; Ain, A.; Ajith, P.; Akutsu, T.; de Alarcón, P.F.; Akcay, S.; Albanesi, S.; Allocca, A.; Altin, P.A.; Amato, A.; Anand, C.; Anand, S.; Ananyeva, A.; Anderson, S.B.; Anderson, W.G.; Ando,...

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Abstract

We report on the population properties of compact binary mergers inferred from gravitational-wave observations of these systems during the first three LIGO-Virgo observing runs. The Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog 3 (GWTC-3) contains signals consistent with three classes of binary mergers: binary black hole, binary neutron star, and neutron star-black hole mergers. We infer the binary neutron star merger rate to be between 10 and 1700 Gpc-3 yr-1 and the neutron star-black hole merger rate to be between 7.8 and 140 Gpc-3 yr-1, assuming a constant rate density in the comoving frame and taking the union of 90% credible intervals for methods used in this work. We infer the binary black hole merger rate, allowing for evolution with redshift, to be between 17.9 and 44 Gpc-3 yr-1 at a fiducial redshift (z = 0.2). The rate of binary black hole mergers is observed to increase with redshift at a rate proportional to o1 + z thorn kappa with kappa = 2.9+1.7 -1.8 for z less than or similar to 1. Using both binary neutron star and neutron star-black hole binaries, we obtain a broad, relatively flat neutron star mass distribution extending from 1.2+0.1-0.2to 2.0+0.3 -0.3 M circle dot. We confidently determine that the merger rate as a function of mass sharply declines after the expected maximum neutron star mass, but cannot yet confirm or rule out the existence of a lower mass gap between neutron stars and black holes. We also find the binary black hole mass distribution has localized over-and underdensities relative to a power-law distribution, with peaks emerging at chirp masses of 8.3+0.3-0.5 and 27.9+1.9 -1.8 M circle dot. While we continue to find that the mass distribution of a binary's more massive component strongly decreases as a function of primary mass, we observe no evidence of a strongly suppressed merger rate above approximately 60M circle dot, which would indicate the presence of a upper mass gap. Observed black hole spins are small, with half of spin magnitudes below chi i approximate to 0.25. While the majority of spins are preferentially aligned with the orbital angular momentum, we infer evidence of antialigned spins among the binary population. We observe an increase in spin magnitude for systems with more unequal-mass ratio. We also observe evidence of misalignment of spins relative to the orbital angular momentum.

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