Understand
The catalog of gravitational-wave events is growing, and so are our hopes of constraining the underlying astrophysics of stellar-mass black-hole mergers by inferring the distributions of, e.g., masses and spins.
- While conventional analyses parametrize this population with simple phenomenological models, we propose an emulation-based approach that can compare astrophysical simulations against gravitational-wave data.
- We combine state-of-the-art deep-learning techniques with hierarchical Bayesian inference and exploit our approach to constrain the properties of repeated black-hole mergers from the gravitational-wave events in the most recent LIGO/Virgo catalog.
- Deep neural networks allow us to (i) construct a flexible single-channel population model that accurately emulates simple parametrized numerical simulations of hierarchical mergers, (ii) estimate selection effects, and (iii) recover the branching ratios of repeated-merger generations.