Tousif Islam

Unified remnant models for aligned-spin, precessing, and eccentric binary black hole mergers

Tousif Islam, Digvijay Wadekar, Gaurav Khanna

Using approximately $5000$ numerical-relativity (NR) simulations spanning mass ratios up to $q = 128$ and $1200$ black-hole-perturbation-theory (BHPT) simulations extending to $q=100…

Merger remnant and eccentricity dynamics surrogates for eccentric nonspinning black hole binaries

Adhrit Ravichandran, Peter James Nee, Keefe Mitman +22

Accurate models of merger remnants are increasingly important for gravitational-wave science, including precision tests of gravity with ringdown, inference of black-hole population…

Discovery of Interpretable Surrogates via Agentic AI: Application to Gravitational Waves

Tousif Islam, Digvijay Wadekar, Tejaswi Venumadhav +4

Fast surrogate models for expensive simulations are now essential across the sciences, yet they typically operate as black boxes. We present \texttt{GWAgent}, a large language mode…

gwBenchmarks: Stress-Testing LLM Agents on High-Precision Gravitational Wave Astronomy

Tousif Islam, Digvijay Wadekar, Zihan Zhou

Modern gravitational wave astronomy relies on modeling tasks that often require months of graduate-level effort, including building fast waveform surrogates from expensive numerica…

GW190711_030756 and GW200114_020818: astrophysical interpretation of two asymmetric binary black hole mergers in the IAS catalog

Tousif Islam, Tejaswi Venumadhav, Digvijay Wadekar +6

We provide a comprehensive analysis of GW190711_030756 and GW200114_020818, two of the most significant binary black hole merger candidates in the IAS catalog, with probabilities o…

Recoil kicks from binary black hole mergers in GWTC catalogs: implications for retention and hierarchical mergers

Tousif Islam

We infer recoil (kick) velocities for both individual binary black hole (BBH) mergers and candidate intermediate-mass black hole events, as well as for the BBH populations inferred…

Kick matters: The impact of a new recoil model on the retention of hierarchical black-hole remnants in globular clusters

Tousif Islam, Digvijay Wadekar, Konstantinos Kritos

In globular clusters, hierarchical mergers are among the most promising pathways to forming massive black holes such as GW231123. A key factor determining whether a merger-remnant…

Searching for precessing binary systems with mode-by-mode filtering and marginalization

Zihan Zhou, Digvijay Wadekar, Javier Roulet +8

Nearly all previous binary black hole searches in LIGO--Virgo--KAGRA (LVK) gravitational wave data have assumed that the component spins are aligned with the orbital angular moment…

Progenitor of the recoiling super-massive black hole RBH-1 identified using HST/JWST imaging

Tousif Islam, Tejaswi Venumadhav, Digvijay Wadekar

Using a combination of \textit{Hubble Space Telescope} and \textit{James Webb Space Telescope} imaging, a runaway supermassive black hole (RBH-1) was recently identified with an in…

gr-qc2025★ 1 cited

Accurate models for recoil velocity distribution in black hole mergers with comparable to extreme mass-ratios and their astrophysical implications

Tousif Islam, Digvijay Wadekar

Modeling the remnant recoil velocity (kick) distribution from binary black hole mergers is crucial for understanding hierarchical mergers in active galactic nuclei or globular clus…

Data-driven extraction and phenomenology of eccentric harmonics in eccentric spinning binary black hole mergers

Tousif Islam, Tejaswi Venumadhav, Ajit Kumar Mehta +6

Newtonian and post-Newtonian (PN) calculations indicate that the phenomenology of eccentric binary black hole (BBH) merger waveforms is significantly more complex than that of thei…

gr-qc2025★ 2 cited

Binary black hole population inference combining confident and marginal events from the $IAS - HM$ search pipeline

Ajit Kumar Mehta, Digvijay Wadekar, Isha Anantpurkar +6

We present the population properties of binary black hole mergers identified by the $IAS - HM$ pipeline (which incorporates higher-order modes in the search templates) du…

Improving gravitational wave search sensitivity with TIER: Trigger Inference using Extended strain Representation

Digvijay Wadekar, Arush Pimpalkar, Mark Ho-Yeuk Cheung +9

We introduce a machine learning (ML) framework called $TIER$ for improving the sensitivity of gravitational wave search pipelines. Typically, search pipelines only use a s…

Searching for intermediate mass ratio binary black hole mergers in the third observing run of LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA

Mark Ho-Yeuk Cheung, Digvijay Wadekar, Ajit Kumar Mehta +6

Intermediate mass ratio inspirals (IMRIs) of binary black holes with mass ratios $1 0^{- 4} ≲ q ≲ 0.1$ are astrophysically interesting sources of gravitational waves. Me…

astro-ph.HE2025

gwharmone: first data-driven surrogate for eccentric harmonics in binary black hole merger waveforms

Tousif Islam, Tejaswi Venumadhav, Ajit Kumar Mehta +6

We present gwharmone, the first data-driven surrogate model for eccentric harmonics (as well as the full radiation content) of the dominant quadrupolar mode in eccentric, non-spinn…

astro-ph.IM2025★ 4 cited

GWSurrogate: A Python package for gravitational wave surrogate models

Scott E. Field, Vijay Varma, Jonathan Blackman +9

Fast and accurate waveform models are fundamentally important to modern gravitational wave astrophysics, enabling the study of merging compact objects like black holes and neutron…

gr-qc2025★ 7 cited

Data-driven extraction, phenomenology and modeling of eccentric harmonics in binary black hole merger waveforms

Tousif Islam, Tejaswi Venumadhav, Ajit Kumar Mehta +6

Newtonian and post-Newtonian (PN) calculations suggest that each spherical harmonic mode of the gravitational waveforms (radiation) emitted by eccentric binaries can be further dec…