Impact of gravitational lensing on black hole mass function inference with third-generation gravitational wave detectors

The recent rapid growth of the black hole (BH) catalogue from gravitational waves (GWs) has allowed us to study the substructure of black hole mass function (BHMF) beyond the simplest power-law distribution. However, the BH masses inferred from binary BH merger events, may be systematically 'brightened' or 'dimmed' by the gravitational lensing effect. In this work, we investigate the impact of gravitational lensing on the BHMF inference considering the detection of the third-generation GW detector - the Einstein Telescope (ET). We focus on high redshift, z = 10 in order to obtain the upper limits of this effect. We use Monte Carlo (MC) method to simulate the data adopting three original BHMFs under Un-Lensed and Lensed scenarios, then recover the parameters of BHMFs from the mock data, and compare the difference of results, respectively. We found that all the parameters are well recovered within one standard deviation(std., 1 sigma), and all three BHMF models are reconstructed within 68 per cent credible interval, suggesting that lensing would not change the main structure drastically, even at very high redshifts and with high precision of ET. And the modest influence beyond 50M(circle dot), depends on the modeling of the high mass tail or substructure of BHMF. We conclude that the impact of lensing on BHMF inference with ET can be safely ignored in the foreseeable future. Careful handling of lensing effects is required only when focusing on an accurate estimation of the high mass end of BHMF at high redshifts.

Automated summary

This study investigates the impact of gravitational lensing on the inference of the black hole mass function (BHMF). The results suggest that the lensing effect can be safely ignored in the foreseeable future, except when focusing on an accurate estimation of the high mass end of the BHMF at high redshifts.