We report the detection of 5 new candidate binary black hole (BBH) merger
signals in the publicly released data from the second half of the third
observing run (O3b) of advanced LIGO and advanced Virgo. The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA
(LVK) collaboration reported 35 compact binary coalescences (CBCs) in their
analysis of the O3b data [1], with 30 BBH mergers having coincidence in the
Hanford and Livingston detectors. We confirm 17 of these for a total of 22
detections in our analysis of the Hanford-Livingston coincident O3b data. We
identify candidates using a search pipeline employing aligned-spin
quadrupole-only waveforms. Our pipeline is similar to the one used in our O3a
coincident analysis [2], except for a few improvements in the veto procedure
and the ranking statistic, and we continue to use an astrophysical probability
of one half as our detection threshold, following the approach of the LVK
catalogs. Most of the new candidates reported in this work are placed in the
upper and lower-mass gap of the black hole (BH) mass distribution. One BBH
event also shows a sign of spin-orbit precession with negatively aligned spins.
We also identify a possible neutron star-black hole (NSBH) merger. We expect
these events to help inform the black hole mass and spin distributions inferred
in a full population analysis.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figure