English

A weakly-parametric approach to stochastic background inference in LISA

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2024-05-14 v1 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

Detecting stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds (SGWBs) with The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) is among the mission science objectives. Disentangling SGWBs of astrophysical and cosmological origin is a challenging task, further complicated by the noise level uncertainties. In this study, we introduce a Bayesian methodology to infer upon SGWBs, taking inspiration from Gaussian stochastic processes. We investigate the suitability of the approach for signal of unknown spectral shape. We do by discretely exploring the model hyperparameters, a first step towards a more efficient transdimensional exploration. We apply the proposed method to a representative astrophysical scenario: the inference on the astrophysical foreground of Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals, recently estimated in~\cite{Pozzoli2023}. We find the algorithm to be capable of recovering the injected signal even with large priors, while simultaneously providing estimate of the noise level.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2311.12111,
  title  = {A weakly-parametric approach to stochastic background inference in LISA},
  author = {Federico Pozzoli and Riccardo Buscicchio and Christopher J. Moore and Francesco Haardt and Alberto Sesana},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.12111},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

16 pages, 10 figures, 0 tables

R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:26:36.825Z