TY - JOUR
T1 - Subtracting compact binary foreground sources to reveal primordial gravitational-wave backgrounds
AU - Sachdev, Surabhi
AU - Regimbau, Tania
AU - Sathyaprakash, B. S.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Thomas Callister, Duncan Meacher, and Alan Weinstein for helpful discussions and comments. We thank Joe Romano for carefully reading the paper and providing useful comments. We thank Andrew Matas for providing useful data regarding some of the backgrounds considered in this paper. S. S. acknowledges the support of the Eberly Research Funds of Penn State, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania. S. S. also acknowledges the support of Chateaubriand Fellowship which led to the collaboration between S. S. and T. R. and the start of this project. B. S. S. was supported in part by NSF Grants No. PHY-1836779, No. AST-1716394, and No. AST-1708146 and the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom. We acknowledge the use of ICDS cluster at Penn State for the simulations in this work. This paper has the LIGO document number LIGO-P2000009.
PY - 2020/7/15
Y1 - 2020/7/15
N2 - Detection of primordial gravitational-wave backgrounds generated during the early Universe phase transitions is a key science goal for future ground-based detectors. The rate of compact binary mergers is so large that their cosmological population produces a confusion background that could masquerade the detection of potential primordial stochastic backgrounds. In this paper, we study the ability of current and future detectors to resolve the confusion background to reveal interesting primordial backgrounds. The current detector network of LIGO and Virgo and the upcoming KAGRA and LIGO-India will not be able to resolve the cosmological compact binary source population, and its sensitivity to stochastic background will be limited by the confusion background of these sources. We find that a network of three (and five) third generation (3G) detectors of Cosmic Explorer and Einstein Telescope will resolve the confusion background produced by binary black holes leaving only about 1.3% (respectively, 0.075%) unresolved; in contrast, as many as 25% (respectively, 7.7%) of binary neutron star sources remain unresolved. Consequently, the binary black hole population will likely not limit observation of primordial backgrounds, but the binary neutron star population will limit the sensitivity of 3G detectors to ωGW∼10-11 at 10 Hz (respectively, ωGW∼3×10-12).
AB - Detection of primordial gravitational-wave backgrounds generated during the early Universe phase transitions is a key science goal for future ground-based detectors. The rate of compact binary mergers is so large that their cosmological population produces a confusion background that could masquerade the detection of potential primordial stochastic backgrounds. In this paper, we study the ability of current and future detectors to resolve the confusion background to reveal interesting primordial backgrounds. The current detector network of LIGO and Virgo and the upcoming KAGRA and LIGO-India will not be able to resolve the cosmological compact binary source population, and its sensitivity to stochastic background will be limited by the confusion background of these sources. We find that a network of three (and five) third generation (3G) detectors of Cosmic Explorer and Einstein Telescope will resolve the confusion background produced by binary black holes leaving only about 1.3% (respectively, 0.075%) unresolved; in contrast, as many as 25% (respectively, 7.7%) of binary neutron star sources remain unresolved. Consequently, the binary black hole population will likely not limit observation of primordial backgrounds, but the binary neutron star population will limit the sensitivity of 3G detectors to ωGW∼10-11 at 10 Hz (respectively, ωGW∼3×10-12).
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U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevD.102.024051
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevD.102.024051
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85092394369
VL - 102
JO - Physical Review D
JF - Physical Review D
SN - 2470-0010
IS - 2
M1 - 024051
ER -