Data Release: Population properties and multimessenger prospects of neutron star-black hole mergers following GWTC-3 (Q6710509)

Neutron star-black hole (NSBH) mergers detected in gravitational waves have the potential to shed light on supernova physics, the dense matter equation of state, and the astrophysical processes that power their potential electromagnetic counterparts. We use the population of four candidate NSBH events detected in gravitational waves so far with a false alarm rate 1yr1to constrain the mass and spin distributions and multimessenger prospects of these systems. We find that the black holes in NSBHs are both less massive and more slowly spinning than those in black hole binaries. We also find evidence for a mass gap between the most massive neutron stars and least massive black holes in NSBHs at 98.6% credibility. We consider both a Gaussian and a power-law pairing function for the distribution of the mass ratio between the neutron star and black hole masses but find no statistical preference between the two. Using an approach driven by gravitational-wave data rather than binary simulations, we find that fewer than 14% of NSBH mergers detectable in gravitational waves will have an electromagnetic counterpart. Finally, we propose a method for the multimessenger analysis of NSBH mergers based on the nondetection of an electromagnetic counterpart and conclude that, even in the most optimistic case, the constraints on the neutron star equation of state that can be obtained with multimessenger NSBH detections are not competitive with those from gravitational-wave measurements of tides in binary neutron star mergers and radio and X-ray pulsar observations.