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arXiv · 2508.20308

Flexible Spectral Separation of Multiple Isotropic and Anisotropic Stochastic Gravitational Wave Backgrounds in LISA

Alexander W. Criswell·Sharan Banagiri·Jessica Lawrence·Levi Schult·Steven Rieck·Stephen R. Taylor·Vuk Mandic
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Abstract

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will observe mHz gravitational waves from a wide variety of astrophysical sources. Of these, some will be characterizable as individual deterministic signals; the remainder will overlap to create astrophysical confusion noise. These sources of confusion noise are known as stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds (SGWBs). LISA data is expected to include several such astrophysical SGWBs, including the notable Galactic binary foreground, SGWBs from white dwarf binary populations in satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, and the SGWB from extragalactic stellar-origin binary black holes far from merger. To characterize these astrophysical signals and attempt to seek out possible underlying backgrounds of cosmological origin, it will be necessary to separate the contribution of each SGWB from that of the others. Crucially, several of these SGWBs are expected to be highly anisotropic on the sky, providing a powerful tool for spectral separation. To this end, we present BLIP 2.0: a flexible, GPU-accelerated framework for simulation and Bayesian analysis of arbitrary combinations of isotropic and anisotropic SGWBs. We leverage these capabilities to demonstrate for the first time spectral separation of the Galactic foreground, the Large Magellanic Cloud SGWB, and the SGWB from extragalactic stellar-origin binaries, and show a proof-of-concept for placing upper limits on the detection of an underlying isotropic cosmological SGWB in the presence of multiple astrophysical foregrounds.

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Alexander W. Criswell, Sharan Banagiri, Jessica Lawrence, Levi Schult, Steven Rieck, Stephen R. Taylor, Vuk Mandic. 2025-08-27. Flexible Spectral Separation of Multiple Isotropic and Anisotropic Stochastic Gravitational Wave Backgrounds in LISA. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20308

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