The effect of mission duration on LISA science objectives
Pau Amaro‐Seoane, Manuel Arca Sedda, S. Babak, C. P. L. Berry, Emanuele Berti, Gianfranco Bertone, Diego Blas, Tamara Bogdanović, Matteo Bonetti, Katelyn Breivik, Richard Brito, Robert R. Caldwell, Pedro R. Capelo, Chiara Caprini, Vítor Cardoso, Zack Carson, Hsin-Yu Chen, Alvin J. K. Chua, Irina Dvorkin, Zoltán Haiman, Lavinia Heisenberg, Maximiliano Isi, Nikolaos Karnesis, Bradley J. Kavanagh, T. B. Littenberg, Alberto Mangiagli, Paolo Marcoccia, Andrea Maselli, Germano Nardini, Paolo Pani, Marco Peloso
Abstract
The science objectives of the LISA mission have been defined under the implicit assumption of a 4-years continuous data stream. Based on the performance of LISA Pathfinder, it is now expected that LISA will have a duty cycle of $$\approx 0.75$$, which would reduce the effective span of usable data to 3 years. This paper reports the results of a study by the LISA Science Group, which was charged with assessing the additional science return of increasing the mission lifetime. We explore various observational scenarios to assess the impact of mission duration on the main science objectives of the mission. We find that the science investigations most affected by mission duration concern the search for seed black holes at cosmic dawn, as well as the study of stellar-origin black holes and of their formation channels via multi-band and multi-messenger observations. We conclude that an extension to 6 years of mission operations is recommended.