Polarized Anisotropic Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background Search with Ground-Based Detector Networks
Abstract
Gravitational waves admit a Stokes decomposition into intensity (I), circular polarization (V), and linear polarization (Q, U), analogous to Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarimetry. We implement a full-Stokes maximum-likelihood SGWB map-making analysis for ground-based detector networks, promoting the standard cross-correlation data products used in existing pipelines to a joint reconstruction of I, V, Q, U. Applied to LVK O3 data, we constrain the polarized angular spectra CVVℓ, CEEℓ, CBBℓ and |CIVℓ|. We show that an intensity-only model is biased when polarized sky components are present, since the detector-network Fisher inner product does not generally make the Stokes responses orthogonal. For transient CBC foregrounds, polarized shot noise is not parametrically suppressed relative to ordinary CBC intensity shot noise. The full Stokes framework separates the Stokes sectors while providing access to polarized anisotropies invisible to conventional intensity-only searches.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{boybeyi2026polarized,
title = {{Polarized Anisotropic Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background Search with Ground-Based Detector Networks}},
author = {Töre Boybeyi and Vuk Mandic},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = may,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2605.25772},
eprint = {2605.25772},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25772},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Polarized Anisotropic Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background Search with Ground-Based Detector Networks
AU - Töre Boybeyi
AU - Vuk Mandic
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/05/25
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2605.25772
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25772
AB - Gravitational waves admit a Stokes decomposition into intensity (I), circular polarization (V), and linear polarization (Q, U), analogous to Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarimetry. We implement a full-Stokes maximum-likelihood SGWB map-making analysis for ground-based detector networks, promoting the standard cross-correlation data products used in existing pipelines to a joint reconstruction of I, V, Q, U. Applied to LVK O3 data, we constrain the polarized angular spectra C^VV_ℓ, C^EE_ℓ, C^BB_ℓ and |C^IV_ℓ|. We show that an intensity-only model is biased when polarized sky components are present, since the detector-network Fisher inner product does not generally make the Stokes responses orthogonal. For transient CBC foregrounds, polarized shot noise is not parametrically suppressed relative to ordinary CBC intensity shot noise. The full Stokes framework separates the Stokes sectors while providing access to polarized anisotropies invisible to conventional intensity-only searches.
ER -