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Constraining The Black Hole Mass Spectrum With Gravitational Wave Observations – I. The Error Kernel, Danny C. Jacobs, Joseph E. Plowman, Ronald W. Hellings, Sachiko Tsuruta, Shane L. Larson

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Many scenarios have been proposed for the origin of the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) that are found in the centres of most galaxies. Many of these formation scenarios predict a high-redshift population of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs), with masses M_• in the range 10²≲M_•≲ 10⁵ M_⊙. A powerful way to observe these IMBHs is via gravitational waves the black holes emit as they merge. The statistics of the observed black hole population should, in principle, allow us to discriminate between competing astrophysical scenarios for the origin and formation of SMBHs. However, …