Software and data release for The directional isotropy of LIGO-Virgo binaries by M. Isi, W. M. Farr and V. Varma (2023).
👉 The manuscript is programatically generated using showyourwork; scripts and auxiliary code to produce the results and figures are contained in src/scripts, please see that directory for documentation. Data are stored in Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7775266).
We demonstrate how to constrain the degree of absolute alignment of the total angular momenta of LIGO-Virgo binary black holes, looking for a special direction in space that would break isotropy. We also allow for inhomogeneities in the distribution of black holes over the sky. Making use of dipolar models for the spatial distribution and orientation of the sources, we analyze 57 signals with false-alarm rates ≤ 1/yr from the third LIGO-Virgo observing run. Accounting for selection biases, we find the population of LIGO-Virgo black holes to be consistent with both homogeneity and isotropy. We additionally find the data to constrain some directions of alignment more than others, discuss the interpretation of this measurement and produce posteriors for the directions of total angular momentum of all binaries in our set. While our current constraints are weak, the fact that such a small number of detections can already yield a measurement suggests that this will be a powerful tool in the future; we explore this prospect with a number of simulated catalogs of varying size.
In order to compile the manuscript using showyourwork, you might need to install a custom backwards-compatible version of this package by doing:
pip install -U git+https://github.com/maxisi/showyourwork.git@gwisotropy
You can then simply build the article by calling the following from within the rootdir of this repository:
showyourwork build
For further details, see src/scripts and the showyourwork documentation (linked below).
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