Rarity of precession and higher-order multipoles in gravitational waves from merging binary black holes

Hoy, Charlie, Fairhurst, Stephen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8480-1961 and Mandel, Ilya 2025. Rarity of precession and higher-order multipoles in gravitational waves from merging binary black holes. Physical Review D (particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology) 111 (2) , 023037. 10.1103/physrevd.111.023037

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Abstract

The latest binary black hole population estimates argue for a subpopulation of unequal component mass binaries with spins that are likely small but isotropically distributed. This implies a nonzero probability of detecting spin-induced orbital precession and higher order multipole moments in the observed gravitational-wave signals. In this work we directly calculate the probability for precession and higher-order multipoles in each significant gravitational-wave candidate observed by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaborations. We find that only one event shows substantial evidence for precession: GW200129_065458, and two events show substantial evidence for higher-order multipoles: GW190412 and GW190814; any evidence for precession and higher-order multipole moments in other gravitational-wave signals is consistent with random fluctuations caused by noise. We then compare our observations with expectations from population models, and confirm that current population estimates from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaborations accurately predict the number of observed events with significant evidence for precession and higher-order multipoles. In particular, we find that this population model predicts that a binary with significant evidence for precession will occur once in every ∼50 detections, and a binary with significant evidence for higher-order multipoles will occur once in every ∼70 observations. However, we emphasize that since substantial evidence for precession and higher-order multipoles have only been observed in three events, any population model that includes a subpopulation of binaries yielding ∼2% of events with detectable precession and higher-order multipole moments will likely be consistent with the data. Published by the American Physical Society 2025

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Physics and Astronomy
Additional Information:	License information from Publisher: LICENSE 1: URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, Start Date: 2025-01-22
Publisher:	American Physical Society
ISSN:	2470-0010
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	31 January 2025
Date of Acceptance:	6 December 2024
Last Modified:	31 Jan 2025 09:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/175789

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