In 1915, Einstein's General theory of Relativity predicted the existence of gravitational waves. This prediction was corroborated in September 2015, when the first detection of a gravitational wave signal, emanating from a binary black hole system, was accomplished by the LIGO team. With the advent of this new way of observing the universe, more advanced GW detectors are expected to come online in the near future, among them LISA, KAGRA, Tianqin, and Taiji, each and every one of which should be able to provide more GW data than ever before.

Of all the potential targets that could be observed by these new detectors, compact binaries, or binaries consisting of any permutation of black holes, neutron stars, and white dwarfs, warrant special attention. These compact objects tend to have weak electromagnetic emissions, and are consequently not easily observable using conventional methods. By means of GW observations, however, we expect to see a large number of these binaries, greatly expanding our sample size for these poorly understood systems.

Compact binaries are the result of the evolution of stellar binaries. As a result, the expected GW observations are sure to be relevant to studies of those progenitor binaries, and vice versa. Here, our binary population synthesis studies have a lot of scope in terms of theoretically modelling the binaries which give rise to observable GW signals, predicting the distributions of those signals, and constraining the properties of the progenitor systems via those signals.