Probing the Peak of Star Formation with the Stochastic Background of Binary Black Hole Mergers

Abstract Although the LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA collaboration detects many individually resolvable gravitational-wave events from binary black hole mergers, those that are too weak to be identified individually contribute to the stochastic gravitational-wave background. Unlike the standard cross-correlation search for excess correlated power, a Bayesian search method that models the background as a superposition of an unknown number of mergers enables simultaneous inference of the properties of high-redshift binary black hole populations and accelerated detection of the background. In this work, we apply this templated background search method to 1 day of simulated data at the current LIGO Hanford–Livingston detector network sensitivity to determine whether the weakest mergers contribute information to the detection of the background and to the constraint on the merger redshift distribution at high redshifts. We find that the dominant source of information for the detection of the stochastic background comes from mergers with signal-to-noise ratios just below the individual detection threshold. However, we demonstrate that the weakest mergers do contribute to the constraint on the shape of the redshift distribution not only beyond the peak of star formation, but also beyond the redshifts accessible with individually detectable sources.