Speaker
Description
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will open the millihertz gravitational-wave window and provide a new way to survey the fossil stellar population of our Galaxy through compact binaries composed of white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. This offers enormous potential for population studies, Galactic astrophysics, and multi-messenger astronomy with LISA. However, once a source is detected, can we tell what kind of system we are observing from the LISA data alone? I will present recent work addressing this question for different classes of stellar-remnant binaries. Using simulated LISA catalogues and machine-learning classification, we find that even rare populations such as neutron-star–white-dwarf binaries can be identified with high efficiency, despite substantial overlap with the dominant double-white-dwarf population.