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Identifying loud gravitational-wave bursts from galactic black hole binaries with LISA

ORAL

Abstract

Stellar-mass black hole binaries (BHBs) in galactic nuclei are gravitationally perturbed by the central supermassive black hole (SMBH) of the host galaxy, potentially inducing binary eccentricity oscillations detectable by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a planned space-based gravitational-wave (GW) detector. These highly eccentric binaries emit GWs during each pericenter passage, producing a train of short GW bursts. In this work, we consider the scenario in which multiple BHBs orbit our galaxy's SMBH, Sgr A*, and subsequently undergo eccentricity oscillations. We simulate the emitted GWs in the time domain and add the resulting signal to synthetic LISA data. We analyze the bursts in time-frequency space using a sine-Gaussian wavelet decomposition, which yields the timing and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of each burst event. We further demonstrate how individual binaries can be distinguished based on their orbital periods by searching for periodicities in the event times. This timing information can then be passed to a wavelet reconstruction algorithm for the purposes of fitting and subtracting these sources from LISA data.

Presenters

  • Alan M Knee

    University of British Columbia

Authors

  • Alan M Knee

    University of British Columbia

  • Jessica McIver

    University of British Columbia

  • Smadar Naoz

    UCLA

  • Bao-Minh Hoang

    UCLA

  • Isobel M Romero-Shaw

    Cambridge University