Blinded Mock Data Challenge for Gravitational-Wave Cosmology-I: Assessing the Robustness of Methods Using Binary Black Holes Mass Spectrum

Understand

Gravitational Wave (GW) sources are standard sirens that provide an independent way to map the cosmic expansion history by combining with an independent redshift measurement either from an electromagnetic counterpart for a bright siren or using different statistical techniques for dark sirens.

• In this analysis, we perform the first Blinded Mock Data Challenge (\texttt{Blinded-MDC}) to test the robustness in inferring the value of Hubble constant $H_0$ for a dark siren technique which depends on astrophysical mass distribution of Binary Black Holes (BBHs).
• We have considered different analysis setups for the \texttt{Blinded-MDC} to test both statistical and systematic uncertainties and demonstrate the capabilities in inferring $H_0$ with detector sensitivity as per the fourth observation run of LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA.
• We find that when the astrophysical population of BBHs matches with the underlying assumption of the model, a cosmological pipeline can recover the injected parameters using the observed mass distribution.