Simulation of the White Dwarf -- White Dwarf galactic background in the LISA data

TL;DR

This paper models the galactic white-dwarf binary background for LISA, showing its time modulation and cyclostationary nature, and proposes methods to analyze it to infer properties of binary systems.

Contribution

It introduces a simulation of the white-dwarf background in LISA data and applies cyclostationary process theory to characterize its properties.

Findings

White-dwarf background amplitude varies with time, reaching minima twice a year.

LISA can measure cyclostationary spectral components to study binary distribution.

The background is a cyclostationary process with a one-year period.

Abstract

LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) is a proposed space mission, which will use coherent laser beams exchanged between three remote spacecraft to detect and study low-frequency cosmic gravitational radiation. In the low-part of its frequency band, the LISA strain sensitivity will be dominated by the incoherent superposition of hundreds of millions of gravitational wave signals radiated by inspiraling white-dwarf binaries present in our own galaxy. In order to estimate the magnitude of the LISA response to this background, we have simulated a synthesized population that recently appeared in the literature. We find the amplitude of the galactic white-dwarf binary background in the LISA data to be modulated in time, reaching a minimum equal to about twice that of the LISA noise for a period of about two months around the time when the Sun-LISA direction is roughly oriented towards the Autumn equinox. Since the galactic white-dwarfs background will be observed by LISA not as a stationary but rather as a cyclostationary random process with a period of one year, we summarize the theory of cyclostationary random processes and present the corresponding generalized spectral method needed to characterize such process. We find that, by measuring the generalized spectral components of the white-dwarf background, LISA will be able to infer properties of the distribution of the white-dwarfs binary systems present in our Galaxy.