Gravitational background from dynamical binaries and detectability with 2G detectors

Understand

We study the impact of young clusters on the gravitational wave background from compact binary coalescence.

• We simulate a catalog of sources from population I/II isolated binary stars and stars born in young clusters, corresponding to one year of observations with second-generation (2G) detectors.
• Taking into account uncertainties on the fraction of dynamical binaries and star formation parameters, we find that the background is dominated by the population of binary black holes, and we obtain a value of $\Omega_{gw}(25 \rm{Hz}) = 1.2^{+1.38}_{-0.65} \times 10^{-9}$ for the energy density, in agreement with the actual upper limits derived from the latest observation run of LIGO--Virgo.
• We demonstrate that a large number of sources in a specific corrected mass range yields to a bump in the background.