Exploring the anisotropic gravitational wave background from all-sky mock gravitational wave event catalogues

TL;DR

This study investigates the anisotropic gravitational wave background from local compact binary mergers using all-sky mock catalogs, revealing how source distribution affects angular power spectra and anisotropy levels.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of anisotropic SGWB from local sources using mock catalogs based on cosmological simulations, highlighting the impact of nearby sources on anisotropy.

Findings

Angular power spectra increase linearly with log10(ell) at high multipoles.

Variations in spectra are mainly due to local source distribution fluctuations.

Removing nearby sources reduces spectral variation and aligns results across catalogs.

Abstract

Anisotropic stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) serves as a potential probe of the large-scale structure (LSS) of the universe. In this work, we explore the anisotropic SGWB from local ($z < \sim 0.085$) merging stellar mass compact binaries, specifically focusing on merging stellar binary black holes, merging neutron-star-black-hole binaries, and merging binary neutron stars. The analysis employs seven all-sky mock lightcone gravitational wave event catalogues, which are derived from the Millennium simulation combined with a semi-analytic model of galaxy formation and a binary population synthesis model. We calculate the angular power spectra $\mathrm{C}_\ell$ at multipole moments $\ell$, expressed as $\text{log}_{10} [\ell(\ell+1)\mathrm{C}_\ell/(2\pi)]$, based on the skymaps of the overdensity $\delta_\mathrm{GW}$ in the anisotropic SGWB. The spectra for all three source types exhibit an approximately linear increase with $\text{log}_{10} \ell$ at higher $\ell$ (e.g., $\ell > \sim 30 - 300$) in seven catalogues, with a characteristic slope of $\sim 2$. The spectra of seven catalogues exhibit considerable variations, arising from fluctuations in spatial distribution, primarily in the radial distribution, of nearby sources (e.g., $< 50$ Mpc/h). After subtracting these nearby sources, the variations become much smaller and the spectra for the three source types become closely aligned (within discrepancies of a factor of $\sim 2$ across $\ell = 1 - 1000$ for all catalogues). We also find that including further sources results in a rapid decrease in the anisotropy.