Currently, around 100 binary black hole (BH) mergers have been found in the LIGO-Virgo gravitational wave (GW) data, and upcoming surveys like Cosmic Explorer have the potential to detect BH mergers up to nearly the edge of the observable Universe. Nearly all of the current and previous GW searches use GW waveforms with only the dominant quadrupole mode, i.e., omitting higher-order harmonics which are predicted by general relativity. I will first show a new efficient method to include higher-order harmonics into a GW search pipeline (without drastically increasing the computational cost or substantially degrading the search sensitivity). I will then present detections of ~10 new black hole mergers in the previous LIGO-Virgo O3 data from our new pipeline. Some of the new BH binary detections have astrophysically interesting properties such as BH masses in the IMBH and pair-instability mass gap ranges, high-redshifts (1<z<2), asymmetric mass ratios and positive effective spins. Towards the end, I will change gears and present results from a different GW search for mergers of exotic objects with large tidal deformabilities (e.g., boson stars and black holes with axion clouds).

References: 2312.06631, 2310.15233