Projections of the uncertainty on the compact binary population background using popstock

Understand

The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration has announced the detection of almost 100 binary black holes so far, which have been used in several studies to infer the features of the underlying binary black hole population.

• From these, it is possible to predict the overall gravitational-wave (GW) fractional energy density contributed by black holes throughout the Universe, and thus estimate the gravitational-wave background (GWB) spectrum emitted in the current GW detector band.
• These predictions are fundamental in our forecasts for background detection and characterization, with both present and future instruments.
• The uncertainties in the inferred population strongly impact the predicted energy spectrum, and in this paper we present a new, flexible method to quickly calculate the energy spectrum for varying black hole population features such as the mass spectrum and redshift distribution.