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arXiv · 2511.03604

The first year of LISA Galactic foreground

Riccardo Buscicchio·Federico Pozzoli·Daniele Chirico·Alberto Sesana
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Abstract

Galactic white-dwarf binaries play a central role in the inference model for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. In this manuscript, we employ the $\texttt{bahamas}$ codebase to characterize, in a global-fit fashion, the reconstruction of the Galactic foreground during the first year of observation. To account for its statistical properties, we represent the data in time--frequency domain, and characterize the effectiveness of multiple approaches, e.g. statistically viable likelihoods, sampling schemes, segmentation widths, and gaps density. Our analysis yields consistent results across, with overwhelming evidence in favor of a non-stationary model in less than a month of data. Moreover, we show robustness against the presence of additional extragalactic foregrounds, and test the suitability of our approximations on the more complex simulated data in the $\textit{Yorsh}$ data challenge.

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Riccardo Buscicchio, Federico Pozzoli, Daniele Chirico, Alberto Sesana. 2025-11-05. The first year of LISA Galactic foreground. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03604

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