Approximately ten years before the launch of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission to detect gravitational waves (GW) from space, the scientific community is focusing efforts on the open methodological and computational challenges that will determine the mission’s success. By design, LISA monitors a unique frequency window populated by a wide variety of GW sources: these include compact binaries with a vast range of masses (and mass ratios), from supermassive black holes to white dwarfs, all the way to possibly exotic signals from the early Universe. Many of these signals will be overlapping in time and frequency, leading to source confusion and correlations, and thus the necessity of a global solution. In particular, compact binaries in our galaxy - primarily white dwarfs - will be so numerous and loud that they will limit the mission’s target sensitivity. Furthermore, as the first space mission of its kind, LISA presents data-taking and signal monitoring schemes riddled with challenges the GW community has yet to face, from data gaps to orbit uncertainties.
In this talk, I will introduce several targeted LISA analyses and strategies developed within the (new!) gravitational physics group at ETHZ. I will provide an overview of the work within our group as well as the up-and-coming Swiss LISA data centre. I will then focus on the galactic binary problem: what are our detection expectations, how to identify systems in LISA data (with model selection techniques or machine learning), how to understand and incorporate the associated noise these contribute to the measurement. I will also discuss astrophysical population inference methods which leverage stochastic background signals, and describe how these may enter the LISA global analysis. Finally, I will describe some of the challenges of compiling a catalogue from the LISA mission analysis results.
