Bayesian parameter estimation of stellar-mass black-hole binaries with LISA
Abstract
We present a Bayesian parameter-estimation pipeline to measure the properties of inspiralling stellar-mass black hole binaries with LISA. Our strategy (i) is based on the coherent analysis of the three noise-orthogonal LISA data streams, (ii) employs accurate and computationally efficient post-Newtonian waveforms accounting for both spin-precession and orbital eccentricity, and (iii) relies on a nested sampling algorithm for the computation of model evidences and posterior probability density functions of the full 17 parameters describing a binary. We demonstrate the performance of this approach by analyzing the LISA Data Challenge (LDC-1) dataset, consisting of 66 quasi-circular, spin-aligned binaries with signal-to-noise ratios ranging from 3 to 14 and times to merger ranging from 3000 to 2 years. We recover 22 binaries with signal-to-noise ratio higher than 8. Their chirp masses are typically measured to better than at confidence, while the sky-location accuracy ranges from 1 to 100 square degrees. The mass ratio and the spin parameters can only be constrained for sources that merge during the mission lifetime. In addition, we report on the successful recovery of an eccentric, spin-precessing source at signal-to-noise ratio 15 for which we can measure an eccentricity of .
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2106.05259,
title = {Bayesian parameter estimation of stellar-mass black-hole binaries with LISA},
author = {Riccardo Buscicchio and Antoine Klein and Elinore Roebber and Christopher J. Moore and Davide Gerosa and Eliot Finch and Alberto Vecchio},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.05259},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
15 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables (accepted to Physical Review D on 19 July 2021)