New black hole mergers from a search pipeline for gravitational waves with higher-order harmonics
New black hole mergers from a search pipeline for gravitational waves with higher-order harmonics
Please contact erule@berkeley.edu for zoom links.
Nearly all of the previous gravitational wave (GW) searches in the LIGO-Virgo data include GW waveforms with only the dominant quadrupole mode (l,m)=(2,2), i.e., omitting higher-order harmonics such as (l,m)=(3,3),(4,4) which are predicted by general relativity. I will present detections of new black hole mergers in the LIGO-Virgo O3 data from a novel search pipeline that includes the higher-order harmonics. Some of the new detections are astrophysically interesting as the black holes occupy the upper mass gap and/or are in high-redshift (1<z<2) range. Towards the end, I will change gears and present results from a new GW search for exotic objects with large tidal deformabilities (e.g., boson stars and black holes with axion clouds).
