Compact binary populations

With a catalog of 44 confident binary black hole mergers, gravitational-waves can now be used to probe the population properties of compact binary systems, such as determining their mass and spin distributions. This will allow us to learn about the formation channels both of individual events and within the population as a whole. At MIT, we are interested in determining the effect of selection biases on the inferred population properties. We are also studying the discovery potential of 3G detectors for probing the population properties of compact binaries, such as the star formation rate.