Next-generation observations will revolutionize our understanding of binary black holes and will detect new sources, such as intermediate-mass black holes. Primary science goals include: Discover binary black holes throughout the observable Universe; Reveal the fundamental properties of black holes; Uncover the seeds of supermassive black holes.
Third generation gravitational-wave (GW) detectors are expected to detect a large number of binary black holes (BBHs) to large redshifts, opening up an independent probe of the large scale structure using their clustering. This probe will be compleme
ntary to the probes using galaxy clustering -- GW events could be observed up to very large redshifts ($z sim 10$) although the source localization will be much poorer at large distances ($sim$ tens of square degrees). We explore the possibility of probing the large scale structure from the spatial distribution of the observed BBH population, using their two-point (auto)correlation function. We find that we can estimate the bias factor of population of BBH (up to $z sim 1$) with a few years of observations with these detectors. Our method relies solely on the source-location posteriors obtained the GW events and does not require any information from electromagnetic observations. This will help in identifying the type of galaxies that host the BBH population, thus shedding light on their origins.
Soon after the observation of the first black hole binary (BHB) by advanced LIGO (aLIGO), GW150914, it was realised that such a massive system would have been observable in the milli-Hz (mHz) band few years prior to coalescence. Operating in the freq
uency range 0.1-100 mHz, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) can potentially detect up to thousands inspiralling BHBs, based on the coalescence rates inferred from the aLIGO first observing run (O1). The vast majority of them (those emitting at $f<10$ mHz) will experience only a minor frequency drift during LISA lifetime, resulting in signals similar to those emitted by galactic white dwarf binaries. At $f>10$ mHz however, several of them will sweep through the LISA band, eventually producing loud coalescences in the audio-band probed by aLIGO. This contribution reviews the scientific potential of these new class of LISA sources which, in the past few months, has been investigated in several contexts, including multi-messenger and multi-band gravitational wave astronomy, BHB astrophysics, tests of alternative theories of gravity and cosmography.
The second generation of gravitational-wave detectors are being built and tuned all over the world. The detection of signals from binary black holes is beginning to fulfill the promise of gravitational-wave astronomy. In this work, we examine several
possible configurations for third-generation laser interferometers in existing km-scale facilities. We propose a set of astrophysically motivated metrics to evaluate detector performance. We measure the impact of detector design choices against these metrics, providing a quantitative cost-benefit analyses of the resulting scientific payoffs.
Gravitational waves (GWs) from binary black hole (BBH) mergers provide a new probe of massive-star evolution and the formation channels of binary compact objects. By coupling the growing sample of BBH systems with population synthesis models, we can
begin to constrain the parameters of such models and glean unprecedented knowledge about the inherent physical processes that underpin binary stellar evolution. In this study, we apply a hierarchical Bayesian model to mass measurements from a synthetic GW sample to constrain the physical prescriptions in population models and the relative fraction of systems generated from various channels. We employ population models of two canonical formation scenarios in our analysis --- isolated binary evolution involving a common-envelope phase and dynamical formation within globular clusters --- with model variations for different black hole natal kick prescriptions. We show that solely with chirp mass measurements, it is possible to constrain natal kick prescriptions and the relative fraction of systems originating from each formation channel with $mathcal{O}(100)$ of confident detections. This framework can be extended to include additional formation scenarios, model parameters, and measured properties of the compact binary.
Two important parameters inferred from the gravitational wave signals of binaries of precessing black holes are the spin tilt angles, i.e., the angles at which the black holes spin axes are inclined with respect to the binarys orbital angular momentu
m. The LIGO-Virgo parameter estimation analyses currently provide spin tilts at a fiducial reference frequency, often the lowest frequency used in the data analysis. However, the most astrophysically interesting quantities are the spin tilts when the binary was formed, which can be significantly different from those at the reference frequency for strongly precessing binaries. The spin tilts at formally infinite separation are a good approximation to the tilts at formation in many formation channels and can be computed efficiently for binary black holes using precession-averaged evolution. Here, we present a new code for computing the tilts at infinity that combines the precession-averaged evolution with orbit-averaged evolution at high frequencies and illustrate its application to GW190521 and other binary black hole detections from O3a. We have empirically determined the transition frequency between the orbit-averaged and precession-averaged evolution to produce tilts at infinity with a given accuracy. We also have regularized the precession-averaged equations in order to obtain good accuracy for the very close-to-equal-mass binary parameters encountered in practice. This additionally allows us to investigate the singular equal-mass limit of the precession-averaged expressions, where we find an approximate scaling of $1/(1 - q)$ with the mass ratio $q$.