Riccardo Barbieri

My focus is Gravitational Wave Cosmology and the measure of the Hubble constant (H0) through gravitational waves. In particular, I study how this measure might be affected by systematic errors, i.e. errors due not to experimental features or noise but due to wrong (or unprecise) assumptions in theory. I am now studying the impact of galaxy clustering and galaxy catalog completeness on the H0 posterior. If one wants to use only gravitational waves to measure H0, a galaxy catalog has to be used; however, this catalog are not complete and thus we need assumptions on the galaxies we don't see. I also study the impact of the assumption that all GW events are real: while this assumption is certainly solid for now, it might not be once a lot of new events are added with LIGO third observing run. Furthermore, considering only events with a very low false alarm rate could make us discard some useful information. I then try to incorporate the possibility of not real GW events in the H0 posterior.