Global time-frequency search for stellar-mass binary black holes in LISA

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient, robust pipeline for detecting stellar-mass binary black hole signals in LISA data, capable of handling non-stationary noise and data gaps, with promising results demonstrated on simulated data.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel time-frequency semi-coherent detection pipeline for LISA gravitational wave data, improving robustness and computational efficiency for binary black hole searches.

Findings

Detects signals with SNR ≈ 11 in simulated LISA data

Operates within a day using approximately 40 GPUs

Robust against non-stationary noise and data gaps

Abstract

We present a complete pipeline for detecting and characterising gravitational waves (GWs) produced by the inspiral of stellar-mass binary black holes in data from the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). The analysis framework relies on an efficient time-frequency implementation of an adaptive semi-coherent detection statistic, which we show to be robust against non-stationary noise and the presence of gaps of varying duration and cadence. The search is able to detect signals down to a coherent signal-to-noise ratio $\approx$ 11 over the full parameter space of black holes with spins aligned to the orbital angular momentum and orbital eccentricity $\leq$ 0.01 when deployed on the 2-year-long LISA Data Challenge Yorsh. The search can be run within a day using $\approx$ 40 GPUs. The techniques presented here have wider applications in GW astronomy, in particular the search for extreme-mass-ratio inspirals in LISA data.