5–10 Jul 2021
Europe/Rome timezone

Exploring Anisotropic Gravitational Wave Backgrounds and Foregrounds with LISA

6 Jul 2021, 08:50
20m
Talk in the parallel session Planning Gravitational Wave detections form LISA Planning Gravitational Wave Detections form LISA

Speaker

Alexander Criswell (University of Minnesota)

Description

The future spaceborne gravitational wave detector LISA will probe a vast array of gravitational wave sources in the millihertz frequency band. Many of these sources will not be individually resolvable, instead adding incoherently to form stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds or foregrounds. The angular structure of these stochastic signals on the sky can be used to understand the spatial distributions, astrophysics, and evolution of their component sources. We present a technique for constraining this angular structure in the spherical harmonic basis, using Clebsch-Gordon coefficients to ensure a non-negative gravitational wave power distribution and render the problem suitable for Bayesian inference. We test this method using simulated anisotropic backgrounds as well as a simplified model of the gravitational wave foreground from galactic white dwarf binaries.

Primary author

Alexander Criswell (University of Minnesota)

Co-authors

Dr Sharan Banagiri (University of Minnesota) Tommy Kuan (University of Minnesota) Prof. Vuk Mandic (University of Minnesota) Prof. Joseph Romano (Texas Tech University) Dr Stephen Taylor (Vanderbilt University)

Presentation materials

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