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The improvements in the sensitivity of the gravitational wave (GW) network enable the detection of several large redshift GW sources by third-generation GW detectors. These advancements provide an independent method to probe the large-scale…
This thesis begins with a study of the origin of cosmological fluctuations with special attention to those cases in which the non-Gaussian correlation functions are large. The analysis shows that perturbations from an almost massless…
Numerical relativity (NR) enables the study of physics in strong and dynamical gravitational fields and provides predictions for the gravitational-wave signals produced by merging black holes. Despite the impressive accuracy of modern…
We describe recent numerical simulations of the merger of a class of equal mass, non-spinning, eccentric binary black hole systems in general relativity. We show that with appropriate fine-tuning of the initial conditions to a region of…
We present single and binary black hole simulations that follow the moving puncture paradigm of simulating black-hole spacetimes without excision, and use moving boxes mesh refinement. Focussing on binary black hole configurations where the…
Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are a ubiquitous component of the nuclei of galaxies. It is normally assumed that, following the merger of two massive galaxies, a SMBH binary will form, shrink due to stellar or gas dynamical processes and…
Parameterised models that predict the gravitational-wave (GW) signal from merging black holes are used to extract source properties from GW observations. The majority of research in this area has focused on developing methods capable of…
Binary black holes (BBHs) are thought to form in different environments, including the galactic field and (globular, nuclear, young and open) star clusters. Here, we propose a method to estimate the fingerprints of the main BBH formation…
Primordial Black Holes (PBH) can form in the early universe and might comprise a significant fraction of the dark matter. Interestingly, they are accompanied by the generation of Gravitational Wave (GW) signals and they could contribute to…
We model for the first time the complete orbital evolution of a pair of Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs) in a 1:10 galaxy merger of two disk dominated gas-rich galaxies, from the stage prior to the formation of the binary up to the onset of…
Formation of primordial black holes (PBHs) on astrophysical mass scales is a natural consequence of inflationary cosmology if the primordial perturbation spectrum has a large and negative running of the spectral index as observationally…
Several models of physics beyond the Standard Model predict the existence of new ultralight bosons. This thesis investigates a way to discover such particles through observations of gravitational waves from binary black holes. This is…
The orbital motion of inspiralling and coalescing black hole binaries can be investigated using a variety of approximation schemes and numerical methods within general relativity: post-Newtonian expansions, black hole perturbation theory,…
We simulate mergers between galaxies containing collisionally-relaxed nuclei around massive black holes (MBHs). Our galaxies contain four mass groups, representative of old stellar populations; a primary goal is to understand the…
For a brief moment, a binary black hole (BBH) merger can be the most powerful astrophysical event in the visible universe. Here we present a model fit for this gravitational-wave peak luminosity of nonprecessing quasicircular BBH systems as…
We introduce (H)DPGMM, a hierarchical Bayesian non-parametric method based on the Dirichlet Process Gaussian Mixture Model, designed to infer data-driven population properties of astrophysical objects without being committal to any specific…
Primordial black holes (PBHs) are an important tool in cosmology to probe the primordial spectrum of small-scale curvature perturbations that reenter the cosmological horizon during radiation domination epoch. We numerically solve the…
We review some of the recent dramatic developments in the fully nonlinear simulation of generic, highly-precessing, black-hole binaries, and introduce a new approach for generating hybrid post-Newtonian / Numerical waveforms for these…
Population III (Pop. III) binary stars likely produced the first stellar-born binary black hole (BBH) mergers in the Universe. Here, we quantify the main sources of uncertainty for the merger rate density evolution and mass spectrum of Pop.…
Binary black holes are the most abundant source of gravitational-wave observations. Gravitational-wave observatories in the next decade will require tremendous increases in the accuracy of numerical waveforms modeling binary black holes,…