Gravitational wave diagnosis of a circumbinary disk

TL;DR

This paper investigates how gravitational wave signals from binary black holes can reveal the presence of surrounding circumbinary disks, using future space-based detectors to identify disk effects through phase evolution analysis.

Contribution

It demonstrates the potential to detect circumbinary disks via gravitational wave phase shifts with upcoming detectors, even for disks much less massive than the binary.

Findings

Detectability of circumbinary disks in gravitational wave signals with DECIGO/BBO.

Significant detection possible for disks with high accretion rates.

Expected detection of about 0.1 coalescence events in dense molecular clouds.

Abstract

When binary black holes are embedded in a gaseous environment, a rotating disk surrounding them, the so-called circumbinary disk, will be formed. The binary exerts a gravitational torque on the circumbinary disk and thereby the orbital angular momentum is transferred to it, while the angular momentum of the circumbinary disk is transferred to the binary through the mass accretion. The binary undergoes an orbital decay due to both the gravitational wave emission and the binary-disk interaction. This causes the phase evolution of the gravitational wave signal. The precise measurement of the gravitational wave phase thus may provide information regarding the circumbinary disk. In this paper, we assess the detectability of the signature of the binary-disk interaction using the future space-borne gravitational wave detectors such as DECIGO and BBO by the standard matched filtering analysis. We find that the effect of the circumbinary disk around binary black holes in the mass range $6M_sun\le{M}\lesssim3\times10^3M_sun$ is detectable at a statistically significant level in five year observation, provided that gas accretes onto the binary at a rate greater than $\dot{M}\sim1.4\times10^{17} [gs^{-1}] j^{-1}(M/10M_sun)^{33/23}$ with 10% mass-to-energy conversion efficiency, where j represents the efficiency of the angular momentum transfer from the binary to the circumbinary disk. We show that $O(0.1)$ coalescence events are expected to occur in sufficiently dense molecular clouds in five year observation. We also point out that the circumbinary disk is detectable, even if its mass at around the inner edge is by over 10 orders of magnitude less than the binary mass.