The construction and use of LISA sensitivity curves

Abstract The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will open the mHz band of the gravitational wave spectrum for exploration. Sensitivity curves are a useful tool for surveying the types of sources that can be detected by the LISA mission. Here we describe how the sensitivity curve is constructed, and how it can be used to compute the signal-to-noise ratio for a wide range of binary systems. We adopt the 2018 LISA mission performance requirement design parameters. We consider both sky-averaged sensitivities, and the sensitivity to sources at particular sky locations. The calculations are included in a publicly available Python notebook.