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Inferring a Population of Intermediate-Mass Black Holes with LISA

POSTER

Abstract

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will be sensitive to the gravitational-wave (GW) emission of binary systems containing intermediate-mass black holes (IMBH) at redshifts z∽1–10. The broad range of redshifts will make it possible to probe the IMBH population on a cosmological scale, which in turn will provide valuable information about supermassive black hole seeds, galaxy mergers, the dynamics of stellar clusters, and other topics. In this work we investigate how well hyperparameters of an underlying IMBH population can be inferred from LISA observations. We study how the number of observed GW events and observational uncertainties affect the quality of the inference, and we also discuss potential systematic uncertainties in the inferred hyperparameters.

* E.B. and V.S. are supported by NSF Grants No. AST-2006538, PHY-2207502, PHY-090003 and PHY-20043, by NASA Grants No. 20-LPS20-0011 and 21-ATP21-0010, by the John Templeton Foundation Grant 62840, and by the Simons Foundation. E.B. and V.S. acknowledge support from the ITA-USA Science and Technology Cooperation program supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Italy (MAECI) and from the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum through the Indo-US Centre for Gravitational-Physics and Astronomy, grant IUSSTF/JC-142/2019. G.F. acknowledges support from NSF Grant AST-1716762 at Northwestern University. The authors acknowledge the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin for providing HPC resources that have contributed to the research results reported (Stanzione et al. 2020) (URL: http://www.tacc.utexas.edu).

Publication: V. Strokov, G. Fragione, and E. Berti. "Inferring a population of intermediate-mass black holes with LISA". In preparation.

Presenters

  • Vladimir Strokov

    Johns Hopkins University

Authors

  • Vladimir Strokov

    Johns Hopkins University

  • Giacomo Fragione

    CIERA, Northwestern University

  • Emanuele Berti

    Johns Hopkins University