2026/07/16 by Androniki Dimitriou, Daniel G. Figueroa, Peera Simakachorn +2
#astro-ph.CO #gr-qc #hep-ph
We study the reconstruction of conventional cosmic-string signals with LISA in the presence of all major known astrophysical foregrounds expected in the LISA band. These include stellar-origin black-hole binaries (SOBHBs), galactic (WDs) and extragalactic (ExWDs) white dwarfs, extreme-mass-ratio-inspirals (EMRIs), and massive black-hole binaries (MBHBs). Using the Simulation-based Inference package GWBackFinder, we perform a joint inference on the LISA noise, foregrounds, and signal, across a range of injected string tensions Gμ. We find that reconstructing tensions with an error \lesssim 10% requires values as large as Gμ\gtrsim 10-11, i.e. a factor ∼105 larger than previous estimates with no foregrounds, and ∼ 102 larger compared to estimates accounting only for SOBHB and WD foregrounds. This work is the second in a series initiated in Ref. arXiv:2508.05395, which aims to quantify LISA's ability to measure representative cosmic-string models.