Description |
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 modes such as (l,m)=(3,3),(4,4). I will present detections of new black hole mergers in the LIGO-Virgo O3 data from a search pipeline that includes the higher-order modes. 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 on GW searches for exotic objects with large tidal deformabilities (e.g., boson stars and black holes with axion clouds).
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