Observationally driven Galactic double white dwarf population for LISA

Understand

Realistic models of the Galactic double white dwarf (DWD) population are crucial for testing and quantitatively defining the science objectives of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a future European Space Agency's gravitational-wave observatory.

• In addition to numerous individually detectable DWDs, LISA will also detect an unresolved confusion foreground produced by the underlying Galactic population, which will affect the detectability of all LISA sources at frequencies below a few mHz.
• So far, the modelling of the DWD population for LISA has been based on binary population synthesis (BPS) techniques.
• The aim of this study is to construct an observationally driven population.