A hierarchical search for gravitational waves from supermassive black hole binary mergers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hierarchical search method using the $ ext{F}$-statistic and stochastic template banks to detect gravitational waves from supermassive black hole mergers in LISA data, demonstrated on mock data.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel hierarchical search technique combining the $ ext{F}$-statistic with stochastic template banks for supermassive black hole binary detection.

Findings

Successfully applied to mock LISA data Challenge 1B dataset.

Effective in recovering binary masses and sky locations.

Demonstrates potential for real LISA data analysis.

Abstract

We present a method to search for gravitational waves from coalescing supermassive binary black holes in LISA data. The search utilizes the $\mathcal{F}$-statistic to maximize over, and determine the values of, the extrinsic parameters of the binary system. The intrinsic parameters are searched over hierarchically using stochastically generated multi-dimensional template banks to recover the masses and sky locations of the binary. We present the results of this method applied to the mock LISA data Challenge 1B data set.