We present a complete pipeline for detecting and characterizing gravitational waves (GWs) produced by the inspiral of stellar-mass binary black holes in data from the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). The analysis framework relies on an efficient time-frequency implementation of an adaptive semi-coherent detection statistic, which we show to be robust against non-stationary noise and the presence of gaps of varying duration and cadence. The search is able to detect signals with coherent signal-to-noise ratios as low as ≈11−14 over the full parameter space of binary black holes with spins aligned to the orbital angular momentum and orbital eccentricity ≤0.01 when deployed on the 2-year-long LISA Data Challenge Yorsh. The search can be run within a day using ≈40 GPUs. The techniques presented here have wider applications in GW astronomy, in particular the search for extreme-mass-ratio inspirals in LISA data.
@article{arxiv.2510.19047,
title = {Global time-frequency search for stellar-mass binary black holes in LISA},
author = {Diganta Bandopadhyay and Christian E. A. Chapman-Bird and Alberto Vecchio},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.19047},
year = {2026}
}