Excitation of high frequency voices from intermediate-mass-ratio inspirals with large eccentricity

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that highly eccentric intermediate-mass-ratio inspirals can produce high frequency gravitational waves detectable by current ground-based detectors, expanding the potential sources for gravitational wave astronomy.

Contribution

It introduces a method to accurately model gravitational waves from eccentric intermediate-mass-ratio inspirals and shows these signals can reach frequencies detectable by LIGO and Virgo.

Findings

High frequency modes can be excited by large eccentricities.

Modes can extend beyond 10 Hz, entering detector sensitivity bands.

Such inspirals could be observable by current ground-based detectors.

Abstract

The coalescence of a stellar-mass compact object together with an intermediate-mass black hole, also known as intermediate-mass-ratio inspiral, is usually not expected to be a viable gravitational wave source for the current ground-based gravitational wave detectors, due to the generally lower frequency of such source. In this paper, we adopt the effective-one-body formalism as the equation of motion, and obtain the accurately calculated gravitational waveforms by solving the Teukolsky equation in frequency-domain. We point out that high frequency modes of gravitational waves can be excited by large eccentricities of intermediate-mass-ratio inspirals. These high frequency modes can extend to more than 10 Hz, and enter the designed sensitive band of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo. We propose that such kind of highly eccentric intermediate-mass-ratio inspirals could be feasible sources and potentially observable by the ground-based gravitational wave detectors, like the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo.