Using Gravitational Waves to Observe the Black Hole Mass Gap due to Pair-Instability Supernovae

It has been suggested that the pair-instability mechanism could prevent the formation of black holes between 50 and 130 solar masses. In this talk, we assess the capability of the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors at design-sensitivity to observe this gap in the black hole mass function. We simulate a population of binary black hole mergers and use Bayesian inference to measure the component masses of the population. The resulting posterior distributions are used to determine if a mass gap can be observed from measurements, and we compare our results to previously observed astrophysical events by ground-based gravitational-wave detectors.