Where are LIGO's Big Black Holes?

TL;DR

This paper investigates the apparent absence of black hole mergers with component masses above 40 solar masses in LIGO data, suggesting it may indicate an upper mass gap and discussing implications for black hole population models.

Contribution

It introduces a model fitting approach to infer the black hole mass distribution and provides evidence supporting the existence of an upper mass gap based on current and simulated data.

Findings

Current data favors a shallow power-law slope for black hole masses.

The inferred maximum black hole mass is around 40 solar masses.

Future detections could confirm the upper mass gap hypothesis.

Abstract

In LIGO's O1 and O2 observational runs, the detectors were sensitive to stellar mass binary black hole coalescences with component masses up to $100\,M_\odot$, with binaries with primary masses above $40\,M_\odot$ representing $\gtrsim90\%$ of the total accessible sensitive volume. Nonetheless, of the 5.9 detections (GW150914, LVT151012, GW151226, GW170104, GW170608, GW170814) reported by LIGO-Virgo, the most massive binary detected was GW150914 with a primary component mass of $\sim36\,M_\odot$, far below the detection mass limit. Furthermore, there are theoretical arguments in favor of an upper mass gap, predicting an absence of black holes in the mass range $50\lesssim M\lesssim135\,M_\odot$. We argue that the absence of detected binary systems with component masses heavier than $\sim40\,M_\odot$ may be preliminary evidence for this upper mass gap. By allowing for the presence of a mass gap, we find weaker constraints on the shape of the underlying mass distribution of binary black holes. We fit a power-law distribution with an upper mass cutoff to real and simulated BBH mass measurements, finding that the first 3.9 BBHs favor shallow power law slopes $\alpha \lesssim 3$ and an upper mass cutoff $M_\mathrm{max} \sim 40\,M_\odot$. This inferred distribution is entirely consistent with the two recently reported detections, GW170608 and GW170814. We show that with $\sim10$ additional LIGO-Virgo BBH detections, fitting the BH mass distribution will provide strong evidence for an upper mass gap if one exists.