Black hole-neutron star mergers from triples - II. The role of metallicity and spin-orbit misalignment

Observations of black hole-neutron star (BH-NS) mergers via gravitational waves (GWs) are of great interest for their electromagnetic counterparts, such as short gamma-ray bursts, and could provide crucial information on the nature of BHs and the NS crust and magnetosphere. While no event has been confirmed, a recent possible detection of a BH-NS merger event by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration has attracted a lot of attention to these sources. In this second paper of the series, we follow-up our study of the dynamical evolution of triples composed of an inner BH-NS binary. In particular, we examine how the progenitor metallicity affects the characteristics of the BH-NS mergers in triples. We determine the distributions of masses, orbital parameters, and merger times, as a function of the progenitor metallicity and initial triple orbital distributions, and show that the typical eccentricity in the LIGO band is ∼10⁻²-10⁻¹. We derive a merger rate range of Г_BH-NS = 1.9 × 10⁻⁴-22 Gpc⁻³ yr⁻¹, consistent the LIGO-Virgo upper limit. Finally, we study the expected spin-orbit misalignments of merging BH-NS binaries from this channel, and find that typically the effective spin distribution is peaked at χ_eff ∼ 0 with significant tails.