Exploring the Universe with Gravitational-Wave Lensing

Ania Liu examines gravitational-wave lensing as a probe of compact objects, dark matter and cosmic large-scale structure. Propagation over cosmological distances can distort signals, but identifying lensing in observations requires disentangling those distortions from uncertain waveform models and other astrophysical effects. The talk describes this phenomenology and the ambiguities it creates for interpretation, then presents recent methods and results from lensing searches using LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA data.