Discovering intermediate-mass black hole lenses through gravitational wave lensing

Understand

Intermediate-mass black holes are the missing link that connects stellar-mass to supermassive black holes and are key to understanding galaxy evolution.

• Gravitational waves, like photons, can be lensed, leading to discernable effects such as diffraction or repeated signals.
• We investigate the detectability of intermediate-mass black hole deflectors in the LIGO-Virgo detector network.
• In particular, we simulate gravitational waves with variable source distributions lensed by an astrophysical population of intermediate-mass black holes, and use standard LIGO tools to infer the properties of these lenses.