The Probability Distribution of Astrophysical Gravitational-Wave Background Fluctuations

Understand

The coalescence of compact binary stars is expected to produce a stochastic background of gravitational waves (GW) observable with future GW detectors.

• Such backgrounds are usually characterized by their power spectrum as a function of frequency.
• Here, we present a method to calculate the full 1-point distribution of strain fluctuations.
• We focus on time series data, but our approach generalizes to the frequency domain.