Reconstructing phenomenological distributions of compact binaries via gravitational wave observations

Summary

This is the companion paper to the PopModels framework for inferring population-level properties of gravitational wave sources. It was the first study to simultaneously fit the shape and overall rate of the binary black hole mass distribution. This is also the study which introduced the beta model for compact object spin magnitudes, which is now the most common model in use.

We tested the accuracy of PopModels by generating synthetic data from a known population, and then verifying that we recovered that population from our inference, as shown in Figure 6

Then we used the same inference tools to measure the population from real detections, taking data from LIGO’s first observing run and the available data from LIGO’s second observing run, as shown in Figure 9

Contribution

I was the lead author on this paper. I wrote nearly all of the PopModels framework, which I used to compute nearly all of the results.