12:00–1:00 pm Zoom
Arianna Renzini (Caltech) "Mapping Gravitational-Wave Backgrounds: Investigations in LIGO and Prospects for LISA"
The vast majority of gravitational waves that cross our Universe are not individually resolvable by our detectors, however they build up incoherently to give rise to what we call the gravitational-wave background (GWB). It is possible to search for the background in detector data by assuming the signal is stochastic and presents itself as correlated residual power between multiple detectors. It is furthermore possible to probe the background’s anisotropies and map the signal on the sky, similarly to the CMB. In this talk, I will introduce the signal of gravitational-wave backgrounds and report on current detection efforts in the LIGO-Virgo collaboration. I will then focus on GWB mapping, describing different map-making methods currently applied to LIGO-Virgo data and mock LISA data. In the case of LIGO-Virgo, I will present the current directional upper limits and discuss their implications, while for LISA I will focus on our angular resolution studies, and how projections compare to expected anisotropic signals in the LISA band.
