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Deep learning and Bayesian inference of gravitational-wave populations: Hierarchical black-hole mergers

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arxiv 2203.03651 v2 pith:HEM74FWB submitted 2022-03-07 astro-ph.HE astro-ph.IMgr-qc

Deep learning and Bayesian inference of gravitational-wave populations: Hierarchical black-hole mergers

classification astro-ph.HE astro-ph.IMgr-qc
keywords mergersgravitational-waveblack-holehierarchicalmodelpopulationsimulationsapproach
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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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. Among our results, we find the following: The distribution of host-environment escape speeds favors values less than $100~\mathrm{km\,s^{-1}}$ but is relatively flat, with around $37\%$ of first-generation mergers retained in their host environments; first-generation black holes are born with a maximum mass that is compatible with current estimates from pair-instability supernovae; there is multimodal substructure in both the mass and spin distributions, which, in our model, can be explained by repeated mergers; and binaries with a higher-generation component make up at least $14\%$ of the underlying population. Though these results are inferred through emulation of a simplified model, the deep-learning pipeline we present is readily applicable to realistic astrophysical simulations

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Cited by 10 Pith papers

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    A flexible six-component fit to 259 LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA black-hole mergers finds a roughly geometric sequence of mass peaks but no aligned-spin signal except in the lowest-mass component.

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    astro-ph.HE 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Joint strong-lensing and population inference on resolved gravitational-wave events finds no lensed events and tightens constraints on the black-hole merger rate peak redshift and high-redshift tail.

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