Martina Muratore "Glimpses into the Challenges of LISA Data Analysis"

Friday 19 Dec 2025, 13:00 → 14:30 Europe/Rome

Sala Cortini (Fermi Building) (La Sapienza)

The space-based gravitational-wave detector, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), was adopted as a mission by the European Space Agency in January 2024 and is scheduled for launch in 2035. To achieve its science objectives, it is crucial to develop a robust data-analysis pipeline for LISA.
Unlike current ground-based GW detectors such as LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA, LISA will be signal-dominated. Multiple gravitational-wave signals will overlap in time and frequency. In addition, we will not have a direct and independent measurement of the instrument noise. As a result, we will have to estimate its properties simultaneously with the parameters of the astrophysical sources.
The simultaneous characterisation of all the expected sources of multiple and different types, together with the instrumental properties, is usually referred to as the LISA global fit.

In this talk, I will give an overview of the data-analysis methodologies and pipelines that the LISA scientific community is developing. I will cover the full chain, from noise pre-processing — also known as time-delay interferometry — to the final parameter estimation of gravitational-wave sources within the global-fit framework. I will also show concrete examples of how data are analysed and the outcomes of such pipelines.