Gravitational-wave inference for eccentric binaries: the argument of periapsis

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the initial argument of periapsis affects gravitational waveforms from eccentric binary black hole mergers and its implications for astrophysical parameter inference.

Contribution

It introduces the importance of including the argument of periapsis in waveform models and assesses its impact on gravitational wave data analysis.

Findings

The argument of periapsis influences waveform morphology.

Current models may already be affected by this parameter.

Resolving the argument of periapsis requires loud gravitational wave signals.

Abstract

Gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers have allowed us to directly observe stellar-mass black hole binaries for the first time, and therefore explore their formation channels. One of the ways to infer how a binary system is assembled is by measuring the system's orbital eccentricity. Current methods of parameter estimation do not include all physical effects of eccentric systems such as spin-induced precession, higher-order modes, and the initial argument of periapsis: an angle describing the orientation of the orbital ellipse. We explore how varying the argument of periapsis changes gravitational waveforms and study its effect on the inference of astrophysical parameters. We use the eccentric spin-aligned waveforms TEOBResumS and SEOBNRE to measure the change in the waveforms as the argument of periapsis is changed. We find that the argument of periapsis could already be impacting analyses performed with TEOBResumS. However, it is likely to be well-resolvable in the foreseeable future only for the loudest events observed by LIGO--Virgo--KAGRA. The systematic error in previous, low-eccentricity analyses that have not considered the argument of periapsis is likely to be small.