Improved inspiral-merger-ringdown model for BBHs on elliptical orbits

TL;DR

This paper presents an improved analytical waveform model for nonspinning binary black holes on elliptical orbits, enhancing accuracy and validation against independent waveforms, with potential extensions to include higher modes and small spins.

Contribution

The work refines a previous time-domain model by optimizing initial orbital parameters, achieving higher match values and broader validation, and introduces an alternative mode-including version.

Findings

Match values exceed 96.5% for systems heavier than 80 solar masses.

Model validated against TEOBResumS-Dali waveform family across a range of eccentricities and mass ratios.

The model can be adapted for systems with small component spins.

Abstract

Gravitational waveforms capturing binary evolution through the early-inspiral phase play a critical role in extracting orbital features that nearly disappear during the late-inspiral and subsequent merger phase due to radiation reaction forces; for instance, the effect of orbital eccentricity. Phenomenological approaches that model compact binary mergers rely heavily on combining inputs from both analytical and numerical approaches to reduce the computational cost of generating templates for data analysis purposes. In a recent work, Chattaraj et al., Phys. Rev. D 106, 124008 (2022) constructed a dominant ($\ell=2$, $|m|=2$) mode model for nonspinning binary black holes (BBHs) on elliptical orbits. The model was constructed in time domain and is fully analytical. The current work is an attempt to improve this model by making a few important changes in our approach. The most significant of those involves identifying initial values of orbital parameters with which the inspiral part of the model is evolved. While the ingredients remain the same as in the previous work, the resulting (new) model, when compared against a set of target waveforms constructed here, produces match values better than 96.5% for systems heavier than $80M_\odot$, while with the old model this limit on the total mass is $115M_\odot$. The updated model is validated against an independent eccentric waveform family (TEOBResumS-Dali) for an initial eccentricity ($e_0$), mass ratio ($q$) and mean anomaly ($l_0$) in the range $0\lesssim e_0\lesssim0.3$, $1\lesssim q\lesssim3$ and $-\pi\leq l_0\leq\pi$, respectively. Further, an alternate model including the effect of higher order modes is also provided. Finally, while our model assumes nonspinning components, we show that it could also be used for systems with component spin vectors (anti-) aligned w.r.t. the orbital angular momentum and small spin magnitudes.