Glitch systematics on the observation of massive black-hole binaries with LISA

Abstract

Detecting and coherently characterizing thousands of gravitational-wave signals is a core data-analysis challenge for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). Transient artifacts, or "glitches", with disparate morphologies are expected to be present in the data, potentially affecting the scientific return of the mission. We present the first joint reconstruction of short-lived astrophysical signals and noise artifacts. Our analysis is inspired by glitches observed by the LISA Pathfinder mission, including both acceleration and fast displacement transients. We perform full Bayesian inference using LISA time-delay interferometric data and gravitational waveforms describing mergers of massive black holes. We focus on a representative binary with a detector-frame total mass of $6\times 10^7{M}_{\odot }$ at redshift $5$, yielding a signal lasting $\sim 30\mathrm{h}$ in the LISA sensitivity band. We explore two glitch models of different flexibility, namely a fixed parametric family and a shapelet decomposition. In the most challenging scenario, we report a complete loss of the gravitational-wave signal if the glitch is ignored; more modest glitches induce biases on the black-hole parameters. On the other hand, a joint inference approach fully sanitizes the reconstruction of both the astrophysical and the glitch signal. We also inject a variety of glitch morphologies in isolation, without a superimposed gravitational signal, and show we can identify the correct transient model. Our analysis is an important stepping stone toward a realistic treatment of LISA data in the context of the highly sought-after "global fit".

17 pages, 9 figures, 7 tables (accepted to Physical Review D on 22 September 2023)

References in corpus (6)

• Array Programming with NumPy
• Prototype Global Analysis of LISA Data with Multiple Source Types
• Modeling compact binary signals and instrumental glitches in gravitational wave data
• Detection and characterization of instrumental transients in LISA Pathfinder and their projection to LISA
• Identifying LISA verification binaries among the Galactic population of double white dwarfs
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• Simulation-based inference of black hole ringdowns in the time domain
• Assessing the Impact of Unequal Noises and Foreground Modeling on SGWB Reconstruction with LISA
• Simulation-based population inference of LISA's Galactic binaries: Bypassing the global fit
• Reconstructing the LISA massive black hole binary population via iterative kernel density estimation
• Test for LISA foreground Gaussianity and stationarity: galactic white-dwarf binaries
• Extracting overlapping gravitational-wave signals of galactic compact binaries: a mini review
• Accurate and efficient simulation-based inference for massive black-hole binaries with LISA