The construction and use of dephasing prescriptions for environmental effects in gravitational wave astronomy

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of environmental dephasing effects in gravitational wave signals, introduces new methods for eccentric sources, and shows that eccentricity can enhance detectability of environmental effects.

Contribution

It offers a unified framework for modeling environmental dephasing in GW templates and introduces novel insights into eccentric source dephasing and detection prospects.

Findings

Dephasing effects can be significantly enhanced by eccentricity.

The paper resolves inconsistencies in the literature regarding orbital perturbations.

Detectability of environmental effects is increased for eccentric binaries with low eccentricity.

Abstract

In the first part of this work, we provide a curated overview of the theoretical framework necessary for incorporating dephasing due to environmental effects (EE) in gravitational wave (GW) templates. We focus in particular on the relationship between orbital perturbations in the time-domain and the resulting dephasing in both time and frequency domain, elucidating and resolving some inconsistencies present in the literature. We discuss how commonly studied binary environments often result in several sources of dephasing that affect the GW signal at the same time. This work synthesizes insights from two decades of literature, offering a unified conceptual narrative alongside a curated reference of key formulas, illustrative examples and methodological prescriptions. It can serve both as a reference for researchers in the field as well as a modern introduction for those who wish to enter it. In the second part, we derive novel aspects of dephasing for eccentric GW sources and lay the foundations for consistently treating the full problem. Importantly, we demonstrate that the detectability of EEs can be significantly enhanced in the presence of eccentricity, even for $e_\mathrm{10Hz}\lesssim0.2$, substantially increasing the prospects for detection in ground based detectors. Our results highlight the unique potential of modeling and searching for EE in eccentric binary sources of GWs.