Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2607.01318

Impact of Spacecraft Orbit Uncertainties and Velocity Mismodeling on the LISA Gravitational-Wave Response

Lorenzo Speri·Olaf Hartwig·Waldemar Martens·Oliver Jennrich·Eric Joffre·Michele Armano·Martin Hewitson·Nora Lützgendorf
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) is a space-based gravitational wave observatory that consists of three spacecraft in a near-equilateral triangular formation. The spacecraft orbits are typically assumed to be perfectly known in LISA data analysis studies, but in reality, the orbit determination process introduces uncertainties in the spacecraft positions and velocities. In this work, we investigate how these uncertainties propagate into the LISA detector output and the impact of neglecting the spacecraft velocities. We quantify these errors in the knowledge of the LISA response using mismatches and discuss the implications for gravitational wave data analysis. We find that spacecraft orbit uncertainties impact the LISA response knowledge at high frequencies with worst mismatch below $10^{-7}$. The effect of neglecting the spacecraft velocities is largest at frequencies around $10^{-4}$ Hz with mismatches of order $10^{-4}$. For a galactic binary with frequency $10^{-4}$ Hz and SNR=200 observed for one year, we find that neglecting the spacecraft velocities in the response leads to less than 1-$\sigma$ biases in the parameter estimates. This work provides the first characterization of how errors in the LISA gravitational wave response propagate from gravitational wave strain through detector output to estimated parameters.

Explore related subjects

gr-qcastro-ph.HEastro-ph.IM

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Lorenzo Speri, Olaf Hartwig, Waldemar Martens, Oliver Jennrich, Eric Joffre, Michele Armano, Martin Hewitson, Nora Lützgendorf. 2026-07-01. Impact of Spacecraft Orbit Uncertainties and Velocity Mismodeling on the LISA Gravitational-Wave Response. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01318

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↗