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Inferring the population properties of Galactic binaries from LISA’s stochastic foreground

Federico De Santi1,2,*, Alessandro Santini3, Alexandre Toubiana1,2, Nikolaos Karnesis4,5, and Davide Gerosa1,2

  • *Contact author: f.desanti@campus.unimib.it
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Phys. Rev. D 113, 123006 – Published 2 June, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/9lc5-vgw5

Abstract

Galactic binaries are expected to be the most numerous LISA sources and to produce a stochastic gravitational-wave foreground whose spectral shape encodes information about the underlying population. Extracting this information with standard hierarchical methods is challenging due to the high dimensionality of the problem and the computational cost of global-fit analyses. We present a simulation-based inference framework to measure the population properties of Galactic binaries directly from the reconstructed foreground. Adopting an astrophysically agnostic parametrization in the observable space—defined by signal amplitude, frequency, and frequency derivative—we generate synthetic catalogs and foreground spectra using a global-fit-inspired subtraction algorithm. We then train a neural posterior estimator to map spectra to population parameters. We validate our method on simulated data and recover population parameters with good accuracy, including the total number of binaries. As a byproduct, we present a GPU-accelerated version of the subtraction algorithm, which delivers a ∼102×speed−up compared to previous implementations in the literature. Our results demonstrate that LISA’s stochastic foreground alone carries significant information about the Galactic binary population and provide a practical step toward joint inference from resolved and unresolved sources.

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Phys. Rev. D 113, 123006– Published 2 June, 2026
  • Received 20 February 2026
  • Accepted 5 May 2026
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