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arXiv · 2510.19047

Global time-frequency search for stellar-mass binary black holes in LISA

Diganta Bandopadhyay·Christian E. A. Chapman-Bird·Alberto Vecchio
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Abstract

We present a complete pipeline for detecting and characterizing gravitational waves (GWs) produced by the inspiral of stellar-mass binary black holes in data from the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). The analysis framework relies on an efficient time-frequency implementation of an adaptive semi-coherent detection statistic, which we show to be robust against non-stationary noise and the presence of gaps of varying duration and cadence. The search is able to detect signals with coherent signal-to-noise ratios as low as $\approx 11-14$ over the full parameter space of binary black holes with spins aligned to the orbital angular momentum and orbital eccentricity $\le 0.01$ when deployed on the 2-year-long LISA Data Challenge Yorsh. The search can be run within a day using $\approx 40$ GPUs. The techniques presented here have wider applications in GW astronomy, in particular the search for extreme-mass-ratio inspirals in LISA data.

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Diganta Bandopadhyay, Christian E. A. Chapman-Bird, Alberto Vecchio. 2025-10-21. Global time-frequency search for stellar-mass binary black holes in LISA. https://doi.org/10.1103/339z-w985

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