Disentangling spinning and nonspinning binary black hole populations with spin sorting

The individual component spins of binary black holes (BBHs) are difficult to resolve using gravitational-wave observations but carry key signatures of the processes shaping their formation and evolution. Recent analyses have found conflicting evidence for a sub-population of black holes with negligible spin, but the Default spin magnitude population model used in LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA analyses cannot formally accommodate an excess of systems with zero spin. In this work, we analyze several different simulated BBH populations to demonstrate that even in the face of this mismodeling, spinning and nonspinning populations can be reliably distinguished using the Default spin magnitude population model coupled with spin sorting. While typical analyses sort the binary components by their masses, sorting the components by their spin magnitudes instead offers a complementary view of the properties of individual systems consistent with equal mass and of population-level properties, given binary evolution processes like tidal-spin up that predict asymmetric spin magnitudes among the binary components. We conclude that current observations of the BBH population are inconsistent with a fully nonspinning population, but could be explained by a population with only one spinning black hole per binary or a population with up to 80% nonspinning sources.