On the distribution of stellar-sized black hole spins

Black hole spin will have a large impact on searches for gravitational waves with advanced detectors. While only a few stellar mass black hole spins have been measured using X-ray techniques, gravitational wave detectors have the capacity to greatly increase the statistics of black hole spin measurements. We show what we might learn from these measurements and how the black hole spin values are influenced by their formation channels.
Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, pre-GW150914 detection, refereed and accepted contribution to proceedings of 11th Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves, June 2015, Gwangju, Korea