TY - JOUR

T1 - Probing the large scale structure using gravitational-wave observations of binary black holes

AU - Vijaykumar, Aditya

AU - Saketh, M. V.S.

AU - Kumar, Sumit

AU - Ajith, Parameswaran

AU - Choudhury, Tirthankar Roy

N1 - Funding Information: We thank Jonathan Gair for very useful comments on the manuscript. We also thank Surhud More, Collin Capano, Badri Krishnan, Bala Iyer, Shasvath Kapadia, Archisman Ghosh, and David Keitel for useful discussions and comments. Our research is supported by the Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India. S. K. acknowledges funding from the Scientific and Engineering Research Board, Government of India national postdoctoral fellowship (PDF/2016/001294). In addition, P. A.’s research was supported by the Max Planck Society through a Max Planck Partner Group at ICTS-TIFR and by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research through the CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars program. This work makes use of n um p y , s ci p y , m atplotlib , a stropy , and dynesty software packages. Computations were performed at the Alice cluster at ICTS-TIFR and Atlas cluster at AEI Hannover.

PY - 2023/11/13

Y1 - 2023/11/13

N2 - 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∼10) although the source localization will be much poorer at large distances (∼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 the population of BBHs (up to z∼0.7) with a few years of observations with these detectors. Our method relies solely on the source-location posteriors obtained from the GW events and does not require any information from electromagnetic observations. This will help in identifying the types of galaxies that host the BBH population, thus shedding light on their origins.

AB - 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∼10) although the source localization will be much poorer at large distances (∼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 the population of BBHs (up to z∼0.7) with a few years of observations with these detectors. Our method relies solely on the source-location posteriors obtained from the GW events and does not require any information from electromagnetic observations. This will help in identifying the types of galaxies that host the BBH population, thus shedding light on their origins.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85177045611&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.48550/arXiv.2005.01111

DO - 10.48550/arXiv.2005.01111

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85177045611

VL - 108

JO - Physical Review D

JF - Physical Review D

SN - 2470-0010

IS - 10

M1 - 103017

ER -