Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2507.00694

Muffled Murmurs: Environmental effects in the LISA stochastic signal from stellar-mass black hole binaries

Ran Chen·Rohit S. Chandramouli·Federico Pozzoli·Riccardo Buscicchio·Enrico Barausse
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

The population of unresolved stellar-mass black hole binaries (sBBHs) is expected to produce a stochastic gravitational-wave background (SGWB) potentially detectable by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). In this work, we compute the imprint of astrophysical environmental effect--such as gas dynamical friction and accretion--on this background. Using the sBBHs population constraints obtained by the LIGO--Virgo--Kagra collaboration, we compute the expected SGWB and develop a phenomenological parametric model that can accurately capture the effect of dynamical friction and accretion. Using our model, we perform Bayesian inference on simulated signals to assess the detectability of these environmental effects. We find that even for large injected values of the Eddington ratio, the effect of accretion in the SGWB is undetectable by LISA. However, LISA will be able to constrain the effect of dynamical friction with an upper bound on the gas density of $\rho \lesssim 7.6 \times 10^{-10} \mathrm{g \, cm^{-3}}$, thus probing the sBBH environment forming in typical thin accretion disks around Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs). For injected densities of $\rho \sim 10^{-10}-10^{-9} \mathrm{g} \, \mathrm{cm}^{-3}$, dynamical friction effects can be well measured and clearly distinguished from vacuum, with Bayes factors reaching up to $\sim$ 60, even when the Galactic foreground is included.

Explore related subjects

gr-qcastro-ph.HE

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Ran Chen, Rohit S. Chandramouli, Federico Pozzoli, Riccardo Buscicchio, Enrico Barausse. 2025-07-01. Muffled Murmurs: Environmental effects in the LISA stochastic signal from stellar-mass black hole binaries. https://doi.org/10.1103/w61d-3jk5

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Electrovacuum Black Hole Uniqueness

We prove the black hole uniqueness conjecture in the axially symmetric, stationary, electrovacuum setting, subject to the refined asymptotic analysis of the associated singular harmonic maps, which includes an analyticity hypothesis at the axes. More precisely, it is shown that any asymptotically flat solution of the Einstein--Maxwell equations in this class, with more than one black hole horizon component is either: Majumdar--Papapetrou, up to a duality rotation, in which case all logarithmic angle defects vanish, or every finite axis rod logarithmic angle defect is strictly negative and hence every interaction force is strictly attractive. The proof extends the singular harmonic map method used for vacuum Kerr uniqueness in [18].

gr-qc↗
arXiv2026

Constraining Modified Mass-to-Horizon Cosmology Through Primordial Inflationary Observables

We investigate slow-roll inflation in a modified cosmological framework inspired by a generalized mass-to-horizon relation (MHR), $M=\gamma {c^2 L^n}/{G}$, where $n$ is a real parameter and $\gamma$ a dimensional constant. Using Padmanabhan's emergence paradigm, we derive the modified Friedmann equations for a flat FRW universe and analyze the dynamics of a canonical scalar field (inflaton) under the slow-roll approximation. We study the resulting inflationary phenomenology for power-law and Starobinsky potentials. For power-law potentials, the MHR modification fails to reconcile these models with current CMB constraints on $r$ and $n_s$. In contrast, Starobinsky inflation exhibits significant sensitivity to deviations from $n=1$. A perturbative analysis ($n=1+\Delta$) yields corrections to inflationary observables. We observe that the scalar power-spectrum normalization, under a fixed-Starobinsky prescription, imposes the stringent constraint $0.960 \lesssim n \lesssim 1.040$ for $N=60$ efolds. This is considerably tighter than spectral-index bounds. Our results establish inflation, particularly Starobinsky-like models, as a sensitive probe of generalized horizon thermodynamics and departures from standard MHR scaling.

gr-qc↗
arXiv2026

Improving the Sensitivity of Gravitational Wave Detection with Weighted Conformal Prediction

In the last decade, kilometre-scale interferometric gravitational-wave detectors have observed hundreds of compact binary mergers, the majority of which are binary black holes. However, the data are noise-dominated, and multiple independent search algorithms (pipelines) are used to enhance sensitivity and improve robustness. Rather than the standard approach of selecting the most significant pipeline output, we combine the outputs from all pipelines using a conformal prediction-based framework to provide statistically rigorous confidence estimates for candidate events. While combining pipelines improves sensitivity and ranking robustness, it requires a principled statistical framework that remains valid as data properties evolve across observing runs. A key challenge is distribution shifts between simulated datasets used for training and calibration and the real, unlabelled, observations used for testing, which can invalidate coverage guarantees and bias confidence estimates. In this work, we address this challenge by incorporating likelihood-ratio reweighting into our conformal prediction framework to account for covariate shift. Using mock datasets containing simulated signals, we demonstrate that weighted conformal prediction restores well-calibrated coverage under covariate shift and increases the confidence of events near the detection threshold, recovering true signals that would otherwise be missed.

gr-qc↗