Spinformation: do gravitational-wave events carry information beyond effective spins?

Abstract

While the spin vectors of binary black holes offer insight into the astrophysical formation channels of these systems, individual spins are less precisely measured through gravitational-wave observations than the effective inspiral spin ${\chi }_{\mathrm{eff}}$ and the effective precession spin ${\chi }_{\mathrm{p}}$. Reducing to effective parameters discards information in the data, but how much information is lost has yet to be demonstrated. Here we show how to quantify whether individual mergers carry information about component spins beyond the constraints implied by effective parameters (a.k.a. spinformation) and apply the technique to GWTC-5. Thresholding on information loss $\gtrsim 0.25$ bits, over $80\%$ of gravitational-wave events in GWTC-5 have component spin posteriors described by ${\chi }_{\mathrm{eff}}$ alone. Only $\sim 3\%$ of gravitational-wave events have substantial spin information not explained by ${\chi }_{\mathrm{eff}}$ and ${\chi }_{\mathrm{p}}$. The catalog's component spin information is effectively two-dimensional in ${\chi }_{\mathrm{eff}}$ and ${\chi }_{\mathrm{p}}$. Using simulated signals, we find the noise realization can create or destroy over a bit of beyond-${\chi }_{\mathrm{eff}}$ information: the structure in real data may therefore be driven by noise. At current sensitivity, component spins provide interpretive\textemdash rather than informational\textemdash advantage over effective parameters.

10 pages, 8 figures. Comments welcome!