Announcing the 3rd round of the Mock LISA Data Challenge!

Ready to have your LISA data analysis software measure up against the competition? Then don't miss the 3rd round of the Mock Lisa Data Challenge, which has just been announced by the Working Group on Data Analysis (LIST-WG1B) of the LISA International Science Team. Here's your chance to find massive black hole mergers, smaller black holes falling into larger ones, and even whip-lashing cosmic strings in the kinds of data set LISA is expected to yield.

The Mock LISA Data Challenges (MLDCs), organized by the Working Group on Data Analysis (LIST-WG1B) of the LISA International Science Team (LIST), play a key role when it comes to evaluating analysis methods and tools for LISA data. The past two rounds have been highly successful both in fostering the development of LISA data analysis tools and capabilities, and of demonstrating the technical readiness already achieved by the gravitational-wave community in distilling a rich science payoff from the LISA data output.

Now, the MLDC Task Force has announced the release of the third round of MLDCs. It consists of five challenges:

1.  A Galactic-binary foreground that now contains both detached and interacting binaries, with frequencies that may intrinsically drift both in the positive and negative directions.
2. Massive black-hole binary waveforms that now include the effects of spin-induced precession of the orbital plane; this dataset includes multiple MBH binary signals on top of a partially subtracted Galactic-binary background.
3. Multiple (kludge) EMRI signals, now superimposed in a single dataset.
4.  A new source: bursts from cosmic string cusps. Because the burst character of this source raises questions about distinguishing GWs from
   instrument noise, for this dataset the levels of the LISA noises are randomized separately on each optical bench, and the entire set of phase
   measurement time series (and not just TDI observables) are being distributed.
5.  Another new source: an isotropic stochastic background of known spectral shape and unknown (but detectable) magnitude. Instrument noises are
   randomized and a full set of phase measurements is provided. To generate this challenge, a new simulator (LISACode by the LISAFrance collaboration) has been integrated into the LISAtools suite.

The data sets are posted on the astrogravs website.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: The final blind datasets were generated on Apr 3-4, 2008; the training datasets are from Apr 1, 2008. Any dataset previously available on the astrogravs website should not be used for the challenge.

The deadline for returning results is 12:59 pm (PST) on Monday 1st December, 2008. Results will be submitted through a web interface similar to what was used for previous MLDCs; instructions will be forthcoming. Challenge participants are strongly encouraged to subscribe to the mailing list where updates and further information will be distributed. Full details are available on the MLDC official site.

The challenge-3 specification will be published as part of the GWDAW-12 proceedings; the current (but still being polished) draft is available
here.

A variety of other resources available for the challenge participants can be found on the LISC website's Introductory Material page.