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  • Open Access

Global time-frequency search for stellar-mass binary black holes in LISA

Diganta Bandopadhyay1,2,*,§, Christian E. A. Chapman-Bird2,†,§, and Alberto Vecchio2,3,‡

  • *Contact author: diganta.bandopadhyay@aei.mpg.de
  • †Contact author: c.chapman-bird@bham.ac.uk
  • ‡Contact author: a.vecchio@bham.ac.uk
  • §These authors contributed equally to this work.
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Phys. Rev. D 114, 064015 – Published 8 September, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/339z-w985

Abstract

We present a complete pipeline for detecting and identifying gravitational waves (GWs) produced by the inspiral of stellar-mass binary black holes in data from the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). The analysis framework relies on an efficient time-frequency implementation of an adaptive semicoherent detection statistic, which we show to be robust against nonstationary noise and the presence of gaps of varying duration and cadence. The search is able to detect signals with coherent signal-to-noise ratios as low as ≈11–14 over the full parameter space of spin-aligned binaries (using nonspinning templates) with orbital eccentricity ≤0.01 when deployed on the 2-year-long LISA Data Challenge Yorsh. The search can be run within a day using ≈40 GPUs. The techniques presented here have wider applications in GW astronomy, in particular the search for extreme-mass-ratio inspirals in LISA data.

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 064015– Published 8 September, 2026
  • Received 22 October 2025
  • Accepted 6 August 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by the Max Planck Society.

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