papers

Publications (8)

astro-ph.HE2024

Cosmic Cousins: Identification of a Subpopulation of Binary Black Holes Consistent with Isolated Binary Evolution

Jaxen Godfrey, Bruce Edelman, Ben Farr

Observations of gravitational waves (GWs) from merging compact binaries have become a regular occurrence. The continued advancement of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration dete…

gr-qc2022

Constraining Unmodeled Physics with Compact Binary Mergers from GWTC-1

Bruce Edelman, Francisco J. Rivera-Paleo, J. D. Merritt +8

We present a flexible model to describe the effects of generic deviations of observed gravitational wave signals from modeled waveforms in the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave det…

astro-ph.HE2022

Ain't No Mountain High Enough: Semi-Parametric Modeling of LIGO-Virgos Binary Black Hole Mass Distribution

Bruce Edelman, Zoheyr Doctor, Jaxen Godfrey +1

We introduce a semi-parametric model for the primary mass distribution of binary black holes (BBHs) observed with gravitational waves (GWs) that applies a cubic-spline perturbation…

gr-qc2022

Transient glitch mitigation in Advanced LIGO data with

Jonathan Merritt, Ben Farr, Rachel Hur +2

"Glitches" -- transient noise artifacts in the data collected by gravitational wave interferometers like LIGO and Virgo -- are an ever-present obstacle for the search and character…

astro-ph.HE2023

Cover Your Basis: Comprehensive Data-Driven Characterization of the Binary Black Hole Population

Bruce Edelman, Ben Farr, Zoheyr Doctor

We introduce the first complete non-parametric model for the astrophysical distribution of the binary black hole (BBH) population. Constructed from basis splines, we use these mode…

astro-ph.HE2021

When are LIGO/Virgo's Big Black-Hole Mergers?

Maya Fishbach, Zoheyr Doctor, Thomas Callister +6

We study the evolution of the binary black hole (BBH) mass distribution across cosmic time. The second gravitational-wave transient catalog (GWTC-2) from LIGO/Virgo contains BBH ev…

astro-ph.HE2024

Things that might go bump in the night: Assessing structure in the binary black hole mass spectrum

Amanda M. Farah, Bruce Edelman, Michael Zevin +4

Several features in the mass spectrum of merging binary black holes (BBHs) have been identified using data from the Third Gravitational Wave Transient Catalog (GWTC-3). These featu…

astro-ph.HE2022

Poking Holes: Looking for Gaps in LIGO/Virgo's Black Hole Population

Bruce Edelman, Zoheyr Doctor, Ben Farr

Stellar evolution models predict the existence of a gap in the black hole mass spectrum from due to pair-instability supernovae (PISNe). We investiga…