LISA capture sources: Approximate waveforms, signal-to-noise ratios, and parameter estimation accuracy
434 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Captures of stellar-mass compact objects (COs) by massive ($\sim 10^6 M_\odot$) black holes (MBHs) are potentially an important source for LISA, the proposed space-based gravitational-wave (GW) detector. The orbits of the inspiraling COs are highly complicated; they can remain rather eccentric up until the final plunge, and display extreme versions of relativistic perihelion precession and Lense-Thirring precession of the orbital plane. The strongest capture signals will be ~10 times weaker than LISA's instrumental noise, but in principle (with sufficient computing power) they can be disentangled from the noise by matched filtering. The associated template waveforms are not yet in hand, but theorists will very likely be able to provide them before LISA launches. Here we introduce a family of approximate (post-Newtonian) capture waveforms, given in (nearly) analytic form, for use in advancing LISA studies until more accurate versions are available. Our model waveforms include most of the key qualitative features of true waveforms, and cover the full space of capture-event parameters (including orbital eccentricity and the MBH's spin). Here we use our approximate waveforms to (i) estimate the relative contributions of different harmonics (of the orbital frequency) to the total signal-to-noise ratio, and (ii) estimate the accuracy with which LISA will be able to extract the physical parameters of the capture event from the measured waveform. For a typical source (a $10 M_\odot$ CO captured by a $10^6 M_\odot$ MBH at a signal-to-noise ratio of 30), we find that LISA can determine the MBH and CO masses to within a fractional error of $\sim 10^{-4}$, measure $S/M^2$ (where $S$ and $M$ are the MBH's mass and spin) to within $\sim 10^{-4}$, and determine the sky location of the source to within $\sim 10^{-3}$ stradians.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c760d55e56b3fa453ca1897a171c96925fc1cb36
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- Stellar Remnants in Galactic Nuclei: Mass Segregation (2006, background): “…plunge itself will contain some high-frequency components, it is unlikely to be detectable by LISA as a resolved source, because typically, tens to hundreds of thousands of cycles are required to accumulate enough signal-tonoise ratio (Barack & Cutler 2004a, 2004b; Gair & Wen 2005; Wen&Gair 2005).”
- The Orbital Statistics of Stellar Inspiral and Relaxation near a Massive Black Hole: Characterizing Gravitational Wave Sources (2005, positive): “It is straightforward to integrate the orbits in the eccentricity histograms backward (forward) in time to larger (smaller) values of P; see, e.g., Barack & Cutler (2004a).”
- Doing Science with eLISA: Astrophysics and Cosmology in the Millihertz Regime (2012, background): “The mass quadrupole moment M2 of a Kerr black hole can be measured to within ∆M2 ≈ 10−2 M•3 − 10−4 M•3 for signals with an SNR of 30 (Barack and Cutler, 2004), At the same time ∆M•/M• and ∆S 1/M2• will be estimated to an accuracy of 10−4 – 10−3.”
- Black hole perturbation theory and gravitational self-force (2021, methodology): “In lieu of accurate evolving waveforms, the development of data analysis methods has so far been based on “kludge” waveforms constructed using a host of additional approximations (primarily, post-Newtonian approximations for the fluxes) [77, 7, 71, 5, 181, 37].”
- 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).”
- Primordial gravitational waves, precisely: the role of thermodynamics in the Standard Model (2018, methodology): “[119,120] for SWD(f) and use the parameters specified in Ref.”
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- A Review of Gravitational Waves from Cosmic Domain Walls (2017, background): “[139,140] in addition to instrumental noises of DECIGO and Ultimate DECIGO.”