Digvijay (Jay) Wadekar, Institute for Advanced Study

Title: New black hole mergers from a search pipeline for gravitational waves with higher-order harmonics

Abstract: Currently, around 100 binary black hole (BH) mergers have been found in the LIGO-Virgo-Kagra gravitational wave (GW) data, and upcoming surveys like Cosmic Explorer have the potential to detect BH mergers up to nearly the edge of the observable Universe. Nearly all of the previous GW searches included GW waveforms with only the dominant quadrupole mode, i.e., omitting higher-order harmonics which are predicted by general relativity. I will present detections of ~10 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 have astrophysically interesting properties such as occupation of the pair-instability mass gap, high-redshifts (z between 1 and 2), and positive effective spins.