The effect of mission duration on LISA science objectives

Creators: Amaro Seoane, Pau; Arca Sedda, Manuel; Babak, Stanislav; Berry, Christopher P. L.; Berti, Emanuele; Bertone, Gianfranco; Blas, Diego; Bogdanović, Tamara; Bonetti, Matteo; Breivik, Katelyn; Brito, Richard; Caldwell, Robert; Capelo, Pedro R.; Caprini, Chiara; Cardoso, Vitor; Carson, Zack; Chen, Hsin-Yu; Chua, Alvin J. K.; Dvorkin, Irina; Haiman, Zoltán; Heisenberg, Lavinia; Isi, Maximiliano; Karnesis, Nikolaos; Kavanagh, Bradley J.; Littenberg, Tyson B.; Mangiagli, Alberto; Marcoccia, Paolo; Maselli, Andrea; Nardini, Germano; Pani, Paolo; Peloso, Marco; Pieroni, Mauro; Ricciardone, Angelo; Sesana, Alberto; Tamanini, Nicola; Toubiana, Alexandre; Valiante, Rosa; Vretinaris, Stamatis; Weir, David J.; Yagi, Kent; Zimmerman, Aaron

Abstract

The science objectives of the LISA mission have been defined under the implicit assumption of a 4-years continuous data stream. Based on the performance of LISA Pathfinder, it is now expected that LISA will have a duty cycle of ≈0.75, which would reduce the effective span of usable data to 3 years. This paper reports the results of a study by the LISA Science Group, which was charged with assessing the additional science return of increasing the mission lifetime. We explore various observational scenarios to assess the impact of mission duration on the main science objectives of the mission. We find that the science investigations most affected by mission duration concern the search for seed black holes at cosmic dawn, as well as the study of stellar-origin black holes and of their formation channels via multi-band and multi-messenger observations. We conclude that an extension to 6 years of mission operations is recommended.

Additional Information

© 2021 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Received 31 July 2021. Accepted 09 November 2021. Published 27 December 2021. We thank Danny Laghi and Walter Del Pozzo for help with Fig. 8. C.P.L. Berry is supported by the CIERA Board of Visitors Professorship. E. Berti is supported by NSF Grants No. PHY-1912550 and AST-2006538, NASA ATP Grants No. 17-ATP17-0225 and 19-ATP19-0051, NSF-XSEDE Grant No. PHY-090003, and NSF Grant PHY-20043. D. Blas acknowledges support from the Fundación Jesus Serra and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias under the Visiting Researcher Programme 2021 agreed between both institutions. T. Bogdanović acknowledges the support by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) under award No. 80NSSC19K0319 and by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Award No. 1908042. V. Cardoso acknowledges financial support provided under the European Union's H2020 ERC Consolidator Grant "Matter and strong-field gravity: New frontiers in Einstein's theory" Grant Agreement No. MaGRaTh–646597. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101007855. We thank FCT for financial support through Projects No. UIDB/00099/2020 and through grants PTDC/MAT-APL/30043/2017 and PTDC/FIS-AST/7002/2020. H.-Y. Chen is supported by NASA through NASA Hubble Fellowship Grants No. HST-HF2-51452.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. Z. Haiman acknowledges support by NASA Grant NNX15AB19G and NSF Grants AST-2006176 and AST-1715661. G. Nardini is partly supported by the ROMFORSK Grant Project. No. 302640 "Gravitational Wave Signals From Early Universe Phase Transitions". P. Pani acknowledges financial support provided under the European Union's H2020 ERC, Starting Grant Agreement No. DarkGRA–757480. He also acknowledges support under the MIUR PRIN and FARE programmes (GW-NEXT, CUP: B84I20000100001), and by the Amaldi Research Center funded by the MIUR program "Dipartimento di Eccellenza" (CUP: B81I18001170001). A. Sesana acknowledges financial support provided under the European Union's H2020 ERC Consolidator Grant "Binary Massive Black Hole Astrophysics" (B Massive, Grant Agreement: 818691). K. Yagi acknowledges support from NSF Grant PHY-1806776, NASA Grant 80NSSC20K0523, a Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship and the Owens Family Foundation. D. J. Weir was supported by a Science and Technology Facilities Council Ernest Rutherford Fellowship, Grant no. ST/R003904/1, and by the Academy of Finland, Grants 324882 and 328958. A. Zimmerman is supported by NSF Grant No. PHY-1912578. The authors would like to acknowledge networking support by the GWverse COST Action CA16104, "Black holes, gravitational waves and fundamental physics." The Flatiron Institute is supported by the Simons Foundation. This research has made use of data, software and web tools obtained from the Gravitational Wave Open Science Center (www.gw-openscience.org/), a service of LIGO Laboratory, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration. LIGO Laboratory and Advanced LIGO are funded by the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) as well as the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) of the United Kingdom, the Max-Planck-Society (MPS), and the State of Niedersachsen/Germany for support of the construction of Advanced LIGO and construction and operation of the GEO600 detector. Additional support for Advanced LIGO was provided by the Australian Research Council. Virgo is funded, through the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO), by the French Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Italian Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and the Dutch Nikhef, with contributions by institutions from Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Monaco, Poland, Portugal, Spain.

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