Spectral sirens cosmology from binary black holes populations with sharper mass features

Abstract

Spectral-sirens inference enables the extraction of cosmological parameters from gravitational-wave data alone, without electromagnetic counterparts or galaxy catalogs. We introduce new parametric mass functions for the binary black hole population built as linear combination of truncated power-laws that capture significant structure across the mass spectrum. On analysing the latest gravitational-wave transient catalog, GWTC-4.0, we show that power-laws-only population models constrain the Hubble constant to $H_0=53.3_{-10.8}^{+14.0}\mathrm{km}{\mathrm{s}}^{-1}\mathrm{Mp}{\mathrm{c}}^{-1}$ at $68\%$ confidence level. After probing the robustness of the results with respect to several modelling assumptions, we further test alternative cosmological models, establishing competitive constraints on modified gravitational-wave propagation, while bounds on the dark energy equation-of-state parameters remain uninformative. Projecting to the future O5 observing run with larger datasets at higher redshifts, we forecast substantial improvements in $H_0$ and modified propagation parameters. Our results highlight the strong interplay between the black hole mass distribution and inferred cosmology.

arXiv comment33 pages, 10 figures, 8 tables. Updated to match accepted version