A Fog Over the Cosmological SGWB: Unresolved Massive Black Hole Binaries in the LISA Band

TL;DR

This paper develops an analytical model to quantify how unresolved massive black hole binaries form a foreground that can obscure and inform the detection of the primordial gravitational-wave background with LISA.

Contribution

It introduces a new framework for predicting the astrophysical SGWB from MBHBs, accounting for resolvability thresholds and their impact on cosmological signal detection.

Findings

Unresolved MBHBs can significantly hinder the detection of primordial backgrounds.

The astrophysical foreground acts as both a limit and a probe for black hole populations.

Accurate modeling is essential for separating astrophysical and cosmological signals.

Abstract

Disentangling the rich astrophysical structure of the stochastic gravitational-wave background (SGWB) from its cosmological component is essential for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) to access the physics of the early Universe beyond the reach of any other probe. In this work, we develop an analytical framework to compute the astrophysical contribution to the SGWB arising from an unresolved ensemble of inspiraling and merging black hole binaries. Accounting for various resolvability thresholds, we leverage this framework to predict the amplitude, spectral shape, and detection signal-to-noise ratio of the unresolved background from massive black hole binaries (MBHBs), capturing the possible diversity of its SGWB imprint across a range of astrophysically motivated populations. Through a joint analysis of astrophysical and primordial contributions to the SGWB, we determine the minimum detectable amplitude of the cosmological background across a range of spectral shapes. We demonstrate that, even under optimistic subtraction thresholds, unresolved MBHBs can degrade the detectability of a cosmological signal by multiple orders of magnitude, depending on the spectral shape of the primordial component. Ultimately, the MBHB-induced astrophysical SGWB acts both as a veil and a lens: it imposes a fundamental limit on cosmological sensitivity, yet simultaneously reveals the hidden population of massive black holes beyond the reach of individual detections. Accurate modeling of this late-Universe background is therefore a prerequisite for robust component separation and for realizing LISA's full scientific potential.