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Fast premerger detection of massive black-hole binaries in LISA based on time-frequency excess power

Francesco Nobili1,2,*, Malvina Bellotti3,4, Riccardo Buscicchio3,2,5, Massimo Dotti3,2, and Alessandro Lupi1,2

  • *Contact author: fnobili@uninsubria.it
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Phys. Rev. D 114, 063001 – Published 2 September, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/l85g-ds5n

Abstract

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna is expected to observe gravitational waves from massive black hole binaries across cosmic time. Many are anticipated to be detectable hours to weeks before coalescence. We present a fast algorithm for the premerger detection and preliminary characterization of such binaries. The method performs a search for excess power with a chirping time-frequency morphology in short-time Fourier transform spectrograms. By tiling the time-frequency plane with slices defined by the quadrupole frequency evolution, we define a signal significance relative to a fitted background distribution of instrumental noise and Galactic foreground. Individual search triggers are followed by a coherence tracker that groups triggers consistent with the same physical signal over time. Doing so, our analysis provides progressively refined estimates of the chirp mass and coalescence time. We validate our algorithm on the SangriaHM LISA Data Challenge dataset, successfully detecting all 15 injected massive black hole binaries; 14 of them hours to weeks before merger, while one is only detected after the binary coalescence. The algorithm yields chirp mass relative errors below 3% for high-SNR sources and coalescence time uncertainties of up to a few hours. With a computational cost of less than a second to process a 10-day data segment on a single core, our approach is suitable for generating real-time alerts, triggering protected observational periods, and providing informative priors for Bayesian parameter estimation.

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Phys. Rev. D 114, 063001– Published 2 September, 2026
  • Received 20 February 2026
  • Accepted 30 July 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

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