The gravitational wave background from cosmological compact binaries

By A. Farmer, E. Phinney. 2003

266 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use a population synthesis approach to characterize, as a function of cosmic time, the extragalactic close binary population descended from stars of low to intermediate initial mass. The unresolved gravitational wave (GW) background due to these systems is calculated for the 0.1‐10 mHz frequency band of the planned Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). This background is found to be dominated by emission from close white dwarf‐white dwarf (WD‐ WD) pairs. The spectral shape can be understood in terms of some simple analytic arguments. To quantify the astrophysical uncertainties, we construct a range of evolutionary models which produce populations consistent with Galactic observations of close WD‐WD binaries. The models differ in binary evolution prescriptions as well as initial parameter distributions and cosmic star formation histories. We compare the resulting background spectra, the shapes of which are found to be insensitive to the model chosen, and different to those found recently by Schneider et al. From this set of models, we constrain the amplitude of the extragalactic

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/de1e0e3ff869b9bae8a47186a63a9712daa6804b

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. C. Caprini
2. M. Volonteri
3. Bing Zhang
4. G. Servant
5. J. Dufaux
6. P. Bin'etruy
7. A. Sesana
8. A. Boh'e

Citations in the corpus

• Beyond the Standard Models with cosmic strings (2019, background): “In the LISA window, the binary white dwarf (WD-WD) foreground dominates over the NS-NS and BH-BH foregrounds [177–179].”
• Reconstructing the spectral shape of a stochastic gravitational wave background with LISA (2019, unknown): “[95–100].”
• The imprint of massive black hole formation models on the LISA data stream (2007, background): “…obtained by adding in quadrature the instrumental rms noise (given by e.g. the Larson’s online sensitivity curve generator http://www.srl.caltech.edu/∼shane/sensitivity) and the confusion noise from unresolved galactic (Nelemans et al. 2001) and extragalactic (Farmer & Phinney 2003) WD–WD binaries.”
• Doing Science with eLISA: Astrophysics and Cosmology in the Millihertz Regime (2012, background): “The vast majority will form an unresolved foreground signal in the detector, which is quite different from and much stronger than any diffuse extragalactic background (Farmer and Phinney, 2003).”
• COSMOLOGICAL FAST RADIO BURSTS FROM BINARY WHITE DWARF MERGERS (2013, methodology): “Finally, gravitational waves from binary WDs in the in-spiral and merger phase should be detectable by LISA and DECIGO (Nelemans et al. 2001; Farmer & Phinney 2003).”
• ACCELERATING COMPACT OBJECT MERGERS IN TRIPLE SYSTEMS WITH THE KOZAI RESONANCE: A MECHANISM FOR “PROMPT” TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE, GAMMA-RAY BURSTS, AND OTHER EXOTICA (2010, background): “Since the extragalactic GW background is dominated by close WD-WD binaries (Farmer & Phinney 2003), which are generally assumed to be circular as a result of the preceding common envelope evolution, if the fraction of close binaries that are actually in triple systems is fairly large, as implied by…”
• Gravitational Radiation Detection with Laser Interferometry (2013, background): “…it be possible to observe the mergers of intermediate mass black holes out to cosmological distances, search for the merger of galactic white dwarfs (Farmer and Phinney, 2003), and serve as an early warning sys-tem for extra-galactic compact object inspirals for the ground based detectors.”