English

Deep source separation of overlapping gravitational-wave signals and non-stationary noise artifacts

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2025-06-30 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability Instrumentation and Detectors

Abstract

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will observe gravitational waves in the millihertz frequency band, detecting signals from a vast number of astrophysical sources embedded in instrumental noise. Extracting individual signals from these overlapping contributions is a fundamental challenge in LISA data analysis and is traditionally addressed using computationally expensive stochastic Bayesian techniques. In this work, we present a deep learning-based framework for blind source separation in LISA data, employing an encoder-decoder architecture commonly used in digital audio processing to isolate individual signals within complex mixtures. Our approach enables signals from massive black-hole binaries, Galactic binaries, and instrumental glitches to be disentangled directly in a single step, circumventing the need for sequential source identification and subtraction. By learning clustered latent space representations, the framework provides a scalable alternative to conventional methods, with applications in both low-latency event detection and full-scale global-fit analyses. As a proof of concept, we assess the model's performance using simulated LISA data in a controlled setting with a limited number of overlapping sources. The results highlight deep source separation as a promising tool for LISA, paving the way for future extensions to more complex datasets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.10398,
  title  = {Deep source separation of overlapping gravitational-wave signals and non-stationary noise artifacts},
  author = {Niklas Houba},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.10398},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

26 pages, 19 figures