Speaker
Description
Binary compact object mergers are the result of typically tens to hundreds of million years of evolution. Such evolution follows specific pathways, the details of which at current state-of-art are not yet completely understood. These gaps in our understanding are expected to leave residual ambiguities in the prediction of the astrophysical merger rate which can potentially turns out to bias any population study which uses the merger rate as input. These astrophysical biases can be picked up in cross-correlation (XC) studies. On the astrophysical side, I will investigate two aspects of the compact binary formation channel which are not yet unambiguously understood. I will begin with a study of the effect of mass transfer function. This function relates progenitor and remnant mass across the endpoint of stellar lifespan, and I will use two different transfer functions to quantify the modelling bias. Moving on, I will also investigate another aspect of the formation channel, the so called 'delay function'. Here again, I will consider and contrast four different delay functions. In each case I will discuss implications w.r.t current and upcoming network of GW detectors. XCs between species can also be boosted by the use of suitable techniques. I will also discuss how different beaming functions can boost the XCs between detected GW events and large scale structure. Once again, the implications with different detector networks will be discussed.
