English

Cosmic string gravitational wave backgrounds at LISA: II. Reconstruction of conventional signals over astrophysical foregrounds

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2026-07-16 v1 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

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 GμG\mu. We find that reconstructing tensions with an error 10%\lesssim 10\% requires values as large as Gμ1011G\mu \gtrsim 10^{-11}, i.e. a factor 105\sim10^5 larger than previous estimates with no foregrounds, and 102\sim 10^2 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