Accreting Double White Dwarf Binaries: Implications for LISA

We explore the long-term evolution of mass-transferring white dwarf (WD) binaries undergoing both direct-impact and disk accretion and explore implications of such systems to gravitational-wave (GW) astronomy. We cover a broad range of initial component masses and show that these systems, the majority of which lie within the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna ( LISA ) sensitivity range, exhibit prominent negative orbital frequency evolution (chirp) for a significant fraction of their lifetimes. Using a galactic population synthesis, we predict ∼2700 of these systems will be observable with a negative chirp of 0.1 yr −2 by a space-based GW detector like LISA . We also show that detections of mass-transferring double WD systems by LISA may provide astronomers with unique ways of probing the physics governing close compact object binaries.