Exploring the Parameter Space of Compact Binary Population Synthesis

Abstract

As we enter the era of gravitational wave astronomy, we are beginning to collect observations which will enable us to explore aspects of astrophysics of massive stellar binaries which were previously beyond reach. In this paper we describe COMPAS (Compact Object Mergers: Population Astrophysics and Statistics), a new platform to allow us to deepen our understanding of isolated binary evolution and the formation of gravitational-wave sources. We describe the computational challenges associated with their exploration, and present preliminary results on overcoming them using Gaussian process regression as a simulation emulation technique.

Accepted for Proceedings of IAU Symposium 325

References in corpus (4)

• Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
• Predictions for the Rates of Compact Binary Coalescences Observable by Ground-based Gravitational-wave Detectors
• Compact Remnant Mass Function: Dependence on the Explosion Mechanism and Metallicity
• Surface density effects in quenching: cause or effect?

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Progenitors of gravitational wave mergers: Binary evolution with the stellar grid-based code ComBinE
• The origin of spin in binary black holes: Predicting the distributions of the main observables of Advanced LIGO
• Merging stellar-mass binary black holes
• Mining Gravitational-wave Catalogs To Understand Binary Stellar Evolution: A New Hierarchical Bayesian Framework
• STROOPWAFEL: Simulating rare outcomes from astrophysical populations, with application to gravitational-wave sources
• Gravitational wave population inference with deep flow-based generative network
• Constraints on the contributions to the observed binary black hole population from individual evolutionary pathways in isolated binary evolution
• Density estimation with Gaussian processes for gravitational-wave posteriors
• Exploring the evolution of gravitational-wave emitters with efficient emulation: Constraining the origins of binary black holes using normalising flows
• Testing the robustness of simulation-based gravitational-wave population inference