Probing anisotropies of the Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background with LISA

Nicola Bartolo, Daniele Bertacca, Robert Caldwell, Carlo R Contaldi, Giulia Cusin, Valerio De Luca, Emanuela Dimastrogiovanni, Matteo Fasiello, Daniel G Figueroa, Gabriele Franciolini, Alexander C Jenkins, Marco Peloso, Mauro Pieroni, Arianna Renzini, Angelo Ricciardone, Antonio Riotto, Mairi Sakellariadou, Lorenzo Sorbo, Gianmassimo Tasinato, Jesús TorradoSebastien Clesse, Sachiko Kuroyanagi

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

44 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We investigate the sensitivity of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) to the anisotropies of the Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background (SGWB). We first discuss the main astrophysical and cosmological sources of SGWB which are characterized by anisotropies in the GW energy density, and we build a Signal-to-Noise estimator to quantify the sensitivity of LISA to different multipoles. We then perform a Fisher matrix analysis of the prospects of detectability of anisotropic features with LISA for individual multipoles, focusing on a SGWB with a power-law frequency profile. We compute the noise angular spectrum taking into account the specific scan strategy of the LISA detector. We analyze the case of the kinematic dipole and quadrupole generated by Doppler boosting an isotropic SGWB. We find that β ΩGW ∼ 2 × 10-11 is required to observe a dipolar signal with LISA. The detector response to the quadrupole has a factor ∼ 103 β relative to that of the dipole. The characterization of the anisotropies, both from a theoretical perspective and from a map-making point of view, allows us to extract information that can be used to understand the origin of the SGWB, and to discriminate among distinct superimposed SGWB sources.

Original languageEnglish
Article number009
JournalJournal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
Volume2022
Issue number11
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2022

Keywords

  • gravitational wave detectors
  • gravitational waves / sources
  • gravitational waves / theory
  • physics of the early universe

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