Event Rate Estimates for LISA Extreme Mass Ratio Capture Sources

By Jonathan R. Gair, L. Barack, T. Creighton, Curt J Cutler, S. Larson, E. Phinney, Michele Vallisneri. 2004

168 citations recorded by the source corpus.

One of the most exciting prospects for the LISA gravitational wave observatory is the detection of gravitational radiation from the inspiral of a compact object into a supermassive black hole. The large inspiral parameter space and low amplitude of the signal make detection of these sources computationally challenging. We outline here a first-cut data analysis scheme that assumes realistic computational resources. In the context of this scheme, we estimate the signal-to-noise ratio that a source requires to pass our thresholds and be detected. Combining this with an estimate of the population of sources in the universe, we estimate the number of inspiral events that LISA could detect. The preliminary results are very encouraging—with the baseline design, LISA can see inspirals out to a redshift z = 1 and should detect over a thousand events during the mission lifetime.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c399de7333e661cf5a2820caadd26c62250ce821

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

The basics of gravitational wave theory (2005, background): “Recent thinking suggests that these rates are likely to be rather underestimated—black holes (which are measurable to much greater distances) are likely to dominate the measured rate, perhaps increasing the rate to several dozen or several hundred per year [97].”
Gravitational wave snapshots of generic extreme mass ratio inspirals (2005, methodology): “Detection will instead be done hierarchically using (relatively) short segments of the EMRI signal [17].”
Quantifying the coexistence of massive black holes and dense nuclear star clusters (2009, result): “Due to the substantially higher density of stars in NCs, compared to the underlying host galaxy (see Figure 7.5), past estimates of LISA-detectable gravitational radiation events (e.g. Sigurdsson 1997; Freitag 2001; Gair et al. 2004; Hopman & Alexander 2005, 2006a,b) may need to be revised upwards.”
Probing ultralight bosons with binary black holes (2018, background): “Similarly to the tuning required for the binary signals from EMRIs to fall into the LISA band [145], a companion may excite orbital resonances, inducing a sharp depletion on the GW signal from a supermassive BH cloud.”
Two timescale analysis of extreme mass ratio inspirals in Kerr. I. Orbital Motion (2008, methodology): “It has been estimated [9, 10] that LISA should see about 50 such events per year, based on calculations of stellar dynamics in galaxies’ central cusps[11].”
Gravitational waves from scattering of stellar-mass black holes in galactic nuclei (2008, background): “Finally, we extrapolate our results for galactic models, including the distribution of SMBHs in the universe and accounting for the statistical variance in the number density of stars surrounding the SMBHs, in order to estimate the comoving rate density of binary formation and inspiral.”
The Effect of Mass Segregation on Gravitational Wave Sources near Massive Black Holes (2006, background): “The EMRI rates we found here are promising for the LISA detection rate (Barack & Cutler 2004b; Gair et al. 2004), in spite of the fact that more sources also imply a stronger background noise (Barack & Cutler 2004a).”
Doing Science with eLISA: Astrophysics and Cosmology in the Millihertz Regime (2012, methodology): “We fix the mass of the inspiraling body to 10 M to represent the inspiral of a stellar black hole, as these are expected to dominate the event rate (Gair et al., 2004).”
Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology with Gravitational Waves (2009, background): “A recent study by a number of specialists [170] has concluded that the event rate is high enough and the detection methods robust enough for us to be very optimistic that LISA will detect hundreds of these sources.”