Welcome to LISA small mass ratio binary sources detectability calculator

Here is a calculator that can be used to get an approximate estimate on the detectabilities of black holes in the mass rage of M=(10-1,108)MSun in the entire 4-years life of the upcoming space based gravitational wave detector-LISA.
The website visitors can enter the masses of the black holes M1 and M2. The calculator can return two measures of detectabilty
  1. the horizon distance which is calculated keeping SNR =10;
  2. the SNR which is calculated if the user enters the luminosity distance-d of the binary from LISA.

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Contour plots for SNR= 10. This shows maximum luminosity distances from which the 4 years long IMRIs and EMRIs whose mass-ratio are q<10-2 are observable. The plot area has been divided into four regions which represent the binaries of different components: (i) SMMBH-sub-solar BH, (ii) SMBH-lower mass Stellar BH, (iii) SMBH-PISN mass gap BH, (iv) SMBH-IMBH (this region is partially outside the region of EMRIs). The grey dash-dotted line represents the location of GW190521 type black hole which could be captured as a secondary BH and form an EMRI.

CALCULATOR



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Artist's impression of the LISA mission satellites in the solar system observing gravitational waves from a distant galaxy. University of Florida / Simon Barke (CC BY 4.0); https://www.aei.mpg.de/lisa

This website is an attempt to show the results of our work on "Finding Black Holes That Should Not Exist with Observations in LISA". The original paper is currently in between the collaborators (Chinmay Gandevikar, Prof. Karan Jani, Dr Michael Katz ).
The results shown here are conservative estimates. The actual detectabilities will be better than the numbers estimated here. Only Schwarzschild black holes (spins, a=0) have been considered here. Also the orbits are chosen to have an initial eccentricity, e0=0.2.
Changing these parameters will generally increase the SNR and the detection horizons.
The waveform generation technique used here is from FastEMRIWaveforms package.
The small ratio binaries are very long and waveform generation is also constrained by computational power. In the figure above the effects of these limitations can be seen as a sharp deviation feature in the contours. These will be fixed as and when better waveforms are generated.

The calculator has been coded up by Chinmay G (contant info below). Your questions are welcome!