Abstract

The masses, rates, and spins of merging stellar mass binary black holes (BBHs) detected by aLIGO and Virgo provide challenges to traditional BBH formation and merger scenarios. An active galactic nucleus (AGN) disk provides a promising additional merger channel because of the powerful influence of the gas that drives orbital evolution, makes encounters dissipative, and leads to migration. Previous work showed that stellar mass black holes (sBHs) in an AGN disk migrate to regions of the disk, known as migration traps, where positive and negative gas torques cancel out, leading to frequent BBH formation. Here we build on that work by simulating the evolution of additional sBHs that enter the inner disk by either migration or inclination reduction. We also examine whether the BBHs formed in our models have retrograde or prograde orbits around their centers of mass with respect to the disk, determining the orientation of the spin of the merged BBHs relative to the disk. Orbiters entering the inner disk form BBHs with sBHs on resonant orbits near the migration trap. When these sBHs reach greater than or similar to 80 M circle dot they form BBHs with sBHs in the migration trap, which reach similar to 1000 M-circle dot over 10 Myr. We find 68% of the BBHs in our simulation orbit in the retrograde direction, which implies that BBHs in our merger channel will have small dimensionless aligned spins, chi(eff). Overall, our models produce BBHs that resemble both the majority of BBH mergers detected thus far (0.66-120 Gpc(-3) yr(-1)) and two recent unusual detections, GW190412 (similar to 0.3 Gpc(-3) yr(-1)) and GW190521 (similar to 0.1 Gpc(-3) yr(-1)).