Probing the large scale structure using gravitational-wave observations of binary black holes

Understand

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 complementary 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 $z \sim 0.7$) with a few years of observations with these detectors.