Speaker
Description
While standard analyses of black-hole mergers assume these happen in vacuum, it is expected that these will happen in dense environments. This is particularly true for mergers involving component black holes populating the so-called pair-instability supernova gap, which should form hierarchically as the result of a previous merger in an environment dense enough to retain the remnant black hole. In this talk we will present a fully Bayesian and self-consistent framework to identify the parameters of the potential ancestors of LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA black holes as well as the escape velocity of the corresponding environments. In turn, this allows us to assign posterior probabilities both to the "generation" to which these black-holes belong and to the nature of the corresponding environment. We will showcase the application of these method to existing O1-O3 events.
