Related papers: Exploring the astrophysical origins of binary blac…
Optical observations of normal-stars in binary systems with massive unseen objects have been proposed to search for candidate black holes (BHs) and provide a direct measurement of their dynamical masses. In this paper, we have performed…
The massive black holes we observe in galaxies today are the natural end-product of a complex evolutionary path, in which black holes seeded in proto-galaxies at high redshift grow through cosmic history via a sequence of mergers and…
The properties of the population of merging binary black holes encode some of the uncertain physics of the evolution of massive stars in binaries. The binary black hole merger rate and chirp mass distribution are being measured by…
The growing population of binary black holes (BBHs) observed by gravitational wave detectors is a potential Rosetta stone for understanding their formation channels. Here, we use an upgraded version of our semi-analytic codes {\sc…
Measurements of the binary black hole spin distribution from the growing catalog of gravitational-wave observations can help elucidate the astrophysical processes shaping the formation and evolution of these systems. Spin-orbit resonances…
There are at least two formation scenarios consistent with the first gravitational-wave observations of binary black hole mergers. In field models, black hole binaries are formed from stellar binaries that may undergo common envelope…
Since the initial discovery of gravitational-waves from merging black holes, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration together with Virgo and KAGRA have published 90 gravitational-wave observations of compact binary mergers in the…
When modeling the population of merging binary black holes, analyses have generally focused on characterizing the distribution of primary (i.e. more massive) black holes in the binary, while simplistic prescriptions are used for the…
Recent detections of gravitational waves from merging binary black holes opened new possibilities to study the evolution of massive stars and black hole formation. In particular, stellar evolution models may be constrained on the basis of…
A chain regularization method is combined with special purpose computer hardware to study the evolution of massive black hole binaries at the centers of galaxies. Preliminary results with up to N=260,000 particles are presented. The decay…
Many aspects of the evolution of stars, and in particular the evolution of binary stars, remain beyond our ability to model them in detail. Instead, we rely on observations to guide our often phenomenological models and pin down uncertain…
The observed sample of double neutron-star (NS-NS) binaries presents a challenge to population-synthesis models of compact object formation: the parameters entering into these models must be carefully chosen so as to match (i) the observed…
The population of black holes observed via gravitational waves currently covers the local universe up to a redshift $z\lesssim 1$, for the most massive merging binaries, or $z\lesssim 0.25$ for low-mass BH binaries (BBH). Evolution of the…
Strong gravitational lensing is a powerful tool for probing the nature of dark matter, as lensing signals are sensitive to the dark matter substructure within the lensing galaxy. We present a comparative analysis of strong gravitational…
Gravitational waves provide a powerful probe of both the astrophysical processes driving black hole mergers and the dynamics of the Universe, but these measurements rely on accurately inferring the unknown underlying population. We perform…
I present a simplified analytical model that simulates the evolution of the binary population in a dynamically evolving globular cluster. A number of simulations have been run spanning a wide range in initial cluster and environmental…
We perform binary population synthesis calculations to investigate the incidence of low-mass X-ray binaries and their birth rate in the Galaxy. We use a binary evolution algorithm that models all the relevant processes including tidal…
Population studies of stellar-mass black-hole binaries have become major players in gravitational-wave astronomy. The underlying assumptions are that the targeted source parameters refer to the same quantities for all events in the catalog…
Understanding binary black hole (BBH) dynamics in dense star clusters is key to interpreting the gravitational wave detections by LIGO and Virgo. Here, we perform $N$-body simulations of star clusters, focusing on BBH formation mechanisms,…
With the recent release of the second gravitational-wave transient catalogue (GWTC-2), which introduced dozens of new detections, we are at a turning point of gravitational wave astronomy, as we are now able to directly infer constraints on…