Inferring a Population of Intermediate-Mass Black Holes with LISA

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.