Cosmic string gravitational wave backgrounds at LISA: II. Reconstruction of conventional signals over astrophysical foregrounds
Abstract
We study the reconstruction of conventional cosmic-string signals with LISA in the presence of all major known astrophysical foregrounds expected in the LISA band. These include stellar-origin black-hole binaries (SOBHBs), galactic (WDs) and extragalactic (ExWDs) white dwarfs, extreme-mass-ratio-inspirals (EMRIs), and massive black-hole binaries (MBHBs). Using the Simulation-based Inference package GWBackFinder, we perform a joint inference on the LISA noise, foregrounds, and signal, across a range of injected string tensions . We find that reconstructing tensions with an error requires values as large as , i.e. a factor larger than previous estimates with no foregrounds, and larger compared to estimates accounting only for SOBHB and WD foregrounds. This work is the second in a series initiated in Ref. arXiv:2508.05395, which aims to quantify LISA's ability to measure representative cosmic-string models.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.15219,
title = {Cosmic string gravitational wave backgrounds at LISA: II. Reconstruction of conventional signals over astrophysical foregrounds},
author = {Androniki Dimitriou and Daniel G. Figueroa and Peera Simakachorn and Isak Stomberg and Bryan Zaldivar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.15219},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
19 pages + 8 figures