Correlated magnetic noise from anisotropic lightning sources and the detection of stochastic gravitational waves

Understand

Direct detection of gravitational waves (GWs) from compact binary systems suggests that the merger rate of such events is large, and the sum of their GWs can be viewed as stochastic signals.

• Because of its random nature, cross-correlating the signals from multiple detectors is essential to disentangle the GWs from instrumental noise.
• However, the global magnetic fields in the Earth-ionosphere cavity produce the environmental disturbances at low-frequency bands, known as Schumann resonances, and coupled with GW detectors, they potentially contaminate the stochastic GW signal as a correlated noise.
• Previously, we have presented a simple analytical model to estimate its impact on the detection of stochastic GWs.