Gravitational-Wave Background from Extragalactic Double White Dwarfs for LISA

TL;DR

This study models the extragalactic double white dwarf gravitational-wave background for LISA, assessing its spectrum, detectability, and uncertainties, highlighting its potential to interfere with cosmological signals and informing astrophysical models.

Contribution

It provides updated predictions of the extragalactic DWD SGWB spectrum, incorporating detailed binary evolution effects and quantifying uncertainties for LISA detection.

Findings

The SGWB is detectable by LISA after 4 years across models.

Uncertainties are mainly due to star formation rate and binary evolution assumptions.

Tidal effects and mass transfer can alter the amplitude by up to a factor of 3.

Abstract

Recent studies have revealed the contribution of extragalactic DWD to the astrophysical SGWB could be detectable in the mHz regime by LISA. Conversely, the presence of this SGWB could hamper the detection of cosmological SGWB, which are one of the key targets of GW astronomy. We aim to confirm the spectrum of the extragalactic DWD SGWB and estimate its detectability with LISA under different assumptions. We also aim at understanding the main uncertainties in the spectrum and estimate if the signal could be anisotropic. We use population synthesis code COSMIC with several assumptions on binary evolution and initial conditions. We incorporate a specific treatment to account for the mass transfer and tidal torques after DWDs formation. Our study is in global agreement with previous studies, although we find a lower contribution at high frequencies, due to a different treatment of mass transfer in stellar binaries. We find that the uncertainties in the amplitude are dominated by the SFR model, and to a lesser degree by the binary evolution model. The inclusion of tidal effects and mass transfer episodes in DWDs can change the amplitude of the estimated SGWB up to a factor 3 at the highest frequencies. For all the models, we find that this SGWB would be detectable observable by LISA after 4 years. Under the hypothesis of an homogeneous Universe beyond 200Mpc, anisotropies associated to the astrophysical population of DWDs will likely not be detectable. We provide fits of this SGWB under different assumptions to be used by the community. We demonstrate variability in SGWB predictions, emphasizing uncertainties due to different astrophysical assumptions. We highlight the importance of determining the position of the knee in the SGWB spectrum, as it provides insights on mass transfer models. The prediction of this SGWB is of critical importance for LISA in the context of observing other SGWB.