Multi-spectral sirens: Gravitational-wave cosmology with (multi-) sub-populations of binary black holes

The cosmic expansion rate can be directly measured with gravitational waves (GWs) of the compact binary mergers, by jointly constraining the mass function of the population and the cosmological model via the so called spectral sirens. Such a method relies on the features in the mass functions, which may originate from some individual sub-populations, and hence become blurred/indistinct due to the superposition of different sub-populations. In this work we propose a novel approach to constrain the cosmic expansion rate with sub-populations of GW events, named multi-spectral sirens. We illustrate the advantage of the multi-spectral sirens compared to the traditional spectral sirens by simulation with mock data. The application of this approach to the GWTC-3 data yields H₀=73. 25^+29. 87-₂₅. ₅₅~ Mpc^-1~ km~ s^-1 (median and symmetric 68. 3\% credible level). The incorporation of the bright standard siren GW170817 with a uniform prior in 10, 200 ~ Mpc^-1~ km~ s^-1 gives H₀=72. 38^+15. 03-₉. ₁₃~ Mpc^-1~ km~ s^-1 (68. 3\% confidence level), corresponding to an improvement of 28\% with respect to the measurement from sole GW170817.