Detection Strategies for Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals

Abstract

The capture of compact stellar remnants by galactic black holes provides a unique laboratory for exploring the near horizon geometry of the Kerr spacetime, or possible departures from general relativity if the central cores prove not to be black holes. The gravitational radiation produced by these Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals (EMRIs) encodes a detailed map of the black hole geometry, and the detection and characterization of these signals is a major scientific goal for the LISA mission. The waveforms produced are very complex, and the signals need to be coherently tracked for hundreds to thousands of cycles to produce a detection, making EMRI signals one of the most challenging data analysis problems in all of gravitational wave astronomy. Estimates for the number of templates required to perform an exhaustive grid-based matched-filter search for these signals are astronomically large, and far out of reach of current computational resources. Here I describe an alternative approach that employs a hybrid between Genetic Algorithms and Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques, along with several time saving techniques for computing the likelihood function. This approach has proven effective at the blind extraction of relatively weak EMRI signals from simulated LISA data sets.

10 pages, 4 figures, Updated for LISA 8 Symposium Proceedings

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Cited by in corpus (17)

• Testing General Relativity with Low-Frequency, Space-Based Gravitational-Wave Detectors
• FastEMRIWaveforms: New tools for millihertz gravitational-wave data analysis
• Rapid generation of fully relativistic extreme-mass-ratio-inspiral waveform templates for LISA data analysis
• Bayesian parameter estimation of stellar-mass black-hole binaries with LISA
• Fast and Fourier: Extreme Mass Ratio Inspiral Waveforms in the Frequency Domain
• Non-local parameter degeneracy in the intrinsic space of gravitational-wave signals from extreme-mass-ratio inspirals
• EMRI data analysis with a phenomenological waveform
• Parameter Estimation for Stellar-Origin Black Hole Mergers In LISA
• LISA stellar-mass black hole searches with semicoherent and particle-swarm methods
• Extreme mass ratio inspirals: perspectives for their detection
• A one-stop function for gravitational-wave detection, identification and inference
• A Hamiltonian Monte Carlo method for Bayesian Inference of Supermassive Black Hole Binaries
• Testing gravity with Extreme-Mass-Ratio Inspirals
• Mission Design for the TAIJI misson and Structure Formation in Early Universe
• Astrophysics with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna
• Gravitational Wave Astronomy: Needle in a Haystack
• Constraining the Deviation of Kerr Metric via Bumpy Parameterization and Particle Swarm Optimization in Extreme Mass-Ratio Inspirals