Estimating Astrophysical Population Properties using a multi-component Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background Search

Understand

The recent start of the fourth observing run of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) collaboration has reopened the hunt for gravitational-wave (GW) signals, with one compact-binary-coalescence (CBC) signal expected to be observed every few days.

• Among the signals that could be detected for the first time there is the stochastic gravitational-wave background (SGWB) from the superposition of unresolvable GW signals that cannot be detected individually.
• In fact, multiple SGWBs are likely to arise given the variety of sources, making it crucial to identify the dominant components and assess their origin.
• However, most search methods with ground-based detectors assume the presence of one SGWB component at a time, which could lead to biased results in estimating its spectral shape if multiple SGWBs exist.