Gravitational Radiation from Helium Cataclysmics

Abstract

For a gravitational wave antenna in space, radiation from very large numbers of galactic binaries will be present in the observable frequency band from roughly 10^-5 Hz to 1 Hz. At frequencies above about 3 mHz, signals from thousands of compact binaries will be resolvable in both frequency and direction. At lower frequencies, there will be confusion noise from having more than one binary per frequency resolution bin, even with a year or more of data. In this paper, we extend previous discussions of the galactic binaries to include an improved estimate of the contributions to the confusion noise from AM CVn binaries and their probable progenitors, which we refer to as helium cataclysmics. We find only a slight increase in the confusion noise below about 3 mHz, and essentially no increase at higher frequencies.