Probing Anisotropies of the Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background with LISA

Understand

We investigate the sensitivity of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) to the anisotropies of the Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background (SGWB).

• We first discuss the main astrophysical and cosmological sources of SGWB which are characterized by anisotropies in the GW energy density, and we build a Signal-to-Noise estimator to quantify the sensitivity of LISA to different multipoles.
• We then perform a Fisher matrix analysis of the prospects of detectability of anisotropic features with LISA for individual multipoles, focusing on a SGWB with a power-law frequency profile.
• We compute the noise angular spectrum taking into account the specific scan strategy of the LISA detector.