Orateur
Description
In this contribution, I will present a novel approach for reconstructing the compact-binary mass spectrum and exploiting its population features for gravitational-wave cosmology. We infer the population in the joint source-frame component-mass plane using a flexible mixture model, and introduce a model-independent procedure to identify structures directly from the reconstructed density and quantify their robustness and prominence.
Applied to GWTC-5, the joint reconstruction clarifies the morphology of several familiar mass-spectrum features. In particular, the structure near $\sim35 M_\odot$ is a stable near-equal-mass peak whose projection can appear ambiguously as a peak or shoulder, clarifying differing one-dimensional interpretations. We also find tentative evidence for a weaker unequal-mass feature near $(21,12),M_\odot$. Using the joint component-mass distribution improves the $H_0$ constraint by $33%$ compared with a flexible one-dimensional analysis. While the $\sim10M_\odot$ and $\sim35M_\odot$ features constrain $H_0$ primarily through coherent mass scales, the intermediate unequal-mass structure carries additional information through its intrinsically two-dimensional geometry.
These results highlight the joint mass plane as a useful space both for characterizing compact-binary population structure and for identifying the features that drive spectral-siren cosmology.
| Which working group does your abstract concern? | Populations des sources / Sources populations |
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