In this talk I will provide an overview of the activities of the "Massive Black Hole Binary" sub-unit in the Distributed Data Processing Center (DDPC) for LISA, specifically focusing on the work done in preparation for the upcoming Mojito mock data challenge (MDC) as well as the planned activities in the subunit for the upcoming LISA MDCs.
Extreme-Mass-Ratio Inspirals (EMRIs) are one of the main sources of gravitational waves in the low-frequency band, where space-based detectors like LISA will operate. These systems consist of a stellar-mass compact object (sCO), known as the secondary object—typically a neutron star or a stellar-mass black hole— orbiting a massive black hole (MBH), the primary, in an evolutionary phase...
The Laser Interferometer Space Antennae (LISA), a joint ESA-NASA mission set to launch in 2035, will revolutionise our understanding of gravitational waves, targeting a frequency range of 0.1 mHz to 1 Hz. Among its many observational challenges, one key question is whether Galactic compact binaries composed of black holes and neutron stars can be distinguished from the abundant double white...
We address the challenge to evaluate the response of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) in an accurate and computationally efficient way.
Without approximations, the full LISA response is computationally expensive and traditional approaches, such as the long-wavelength approximation, accelerate the response calculation at the cost of reducing accuracy at high frequencies. Here we...
The LISA mission will detect many overlapping gravitational wave signals, making data analysis particularly challenging. Due to the high dimensionality of the problem, the global fit of all sources using traditional Bayesian methods is expected to be by far the most computationally intensive task that the LISA Distributed Data Processing Centre (DDPC) will perform. As such, there is interest...
In this work, we present a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) magnetic field simulator for technology demonstrators of future space-born gravitational wave detectors. The scientific unit used during the tests is a magnetic experiment system conceived to demonstrate the in-orbit performance of Anisotropic Magnetoresistance (AMR) sensors onboard nanosatellites. As part of the H2020 and Horizon Europe...
LISA Pathfinder was a mission designed to test key technologies required for gravitational wave detection in space. Magnetic forces have an important impact on the instrument sensitivity in the low frequency regime below the millihertz. A precise characterization of the magnetic properties of LISA Pathfinder free falling test-masses is of special interest for future gravitational wave...
UCAnFly is a multidisciplinary team born at the University of Cádiz, recognized as one of the selected projects in the third edition of ESA’s Fly Your Satellite! programme. The team is developing a 1U CubeSat carrying the Magnetic Experiment for LISA (MELISA-II) as its primary payload: a sub-millihertz magnetometer based on Anisotropic Magnetoresistance (AMR) sensors, designed to detect...
I will discuss ongoing efforts on exploiting kinematic anisotropies in LISA for gravitational-wave background reconstruction.
Dark matter may not be completely stable, and its decay could lead to new signatures in the form of gravitational waves. In this talk I will present model-independent predictions for the stochastic gravitational wave background produced by dark matter decaying into gravitons. Using this framework, I forecast the sensitivity of current and upcoming gravitational wave detectors to these signals.
In the context of axion inflation coupled with SU(2) gauge fields, commonly called chromo-natural inflation, the gauge fields' interaction with the axion acts as an extra friction term. Aside from making inflation last more e-folds of evolution, this friction also sources the scalar and tensor sectors for the perturbations, generating a particular gravitational wave signal along with curvature...
Chromo-natural inflation (CNI), coupling a pseudo-scalar axion-inflaton to SU(2) gauge fields, supports interesting signatures — from chiral primordial gravitational waves to large tensor non-Gaussianities and primordial black holes.
In its spectator variant (SCNI), the Chern-Simons coupling between axion and gauge sectors impacts observables even if the axion does not drive inflation. A...
The study of black hole perturbations is essential for understanding the final stages of compact object mergers. In this talk, we will explore perturbations of the Schwarzschild model from a different perspective: the Hamiltonian formalism, in contrast with the commonly used Lagrangian approach. This framework not only reproduces the well-known dynamical results but also sheds new light on the...
Black holes provide a natural arena to probe quantum effects in strong gravity, yet there remain many open questions about their interiors. We study a scalar field inside a nonrotating black hole and show how interior vacua can be extended to the exterior. As an example, we analyze a non-oscillating vacuum obtained by asymptotic Hamiltonian-diagonalization. The extended vacuum state reproduces...
