LISA Source Confusion

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna will detect thousands of gravitational wave sources. Many of these sources will be overlapping in the sense that their signals will have a nonzero cross correlation. Such overlaps lead to source confusion, which adversely affects how well we can extract information about the individual sources. Here we study how source confusion impacts parameter estimation for galactic compact binaries, with emphasis on the effects of the number of overlaping sources, the time of observation, the gravitational wave frequencies of the sources, and the degree of the signal correlations. Our main findings are that the parameter resolution decays exponentially with the number of overlapping sources and superexponentially with the degree of cross correlation. We also find that an extended mission lifetime is key to disentangling the source confusion as the parameter resolution for overlapping sources improves much faster than the usual square root of the observation time.