Environmental effects in the LISA stochastic signal from stellar-mass black hole binaries

The population of unresolved stellar-mass black hole binaries (sBBHs) is expected to produce a stochastic gravitational-wave background (SGWB) potentially detectable by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). In this work, we compute the imprint of astrophysical environmental effects—such as gas dynamical friction and accretion—on this background. Using the sBBH population constraints obtained by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration, we compute the expected SGWB and develop a phenomenological parametric model that can accurately capture the effect of dynamical friction and accretion. Using our model, we perform Bayesian inference on simulated signals to assess the detectability of these environmental effects. We find that, even for large injected values of the Eddington ratio, the effect of accretion in the SGWB is undetectable by LISA. However, LISA will be able to constrain the effect of dynamical friction with an upper bound on the gas density ofρ ≲ 7.6 × 10−10 g cm−3, thus probing the sBBH environment forming in typical thin accretion disks around active galactic nuclei. For injected densities of ρ ∼ 10−10–10−9 g cm−3, dynamical friction effects can be well measured and clearly distinguished from vacuum, with Bayes factors reaching up to ∼60, even when the Galactic foreground is included.