A hierarchical search for gravitational waves from supermassive black hole binary mergers

We present a method to search for gravitational waves from coalescing supermassive binary black holes in LISA data. The search utilizes the -statistic to maximize over, and determine the values of, the extrinsic parameters of the binary system. The intrinsic parameters are searched over hierarchically using stochastically generated multi-dimensional template banks to recover the masses, sky location and coalescence time of the binary. We present the results of this method applied to the Mock LISA Data Challenge 1B data set.