English

Defining eccentricity for spin-precessing binaries

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2025-09-30 v2 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

Standardizing the definition of eccentricity is necessary for unambiguous inference of the orbital eccentricity of compact binaries from gravitational wave observations. In previous works, we proposed a definition of eccentricity for systems without spin-precession that relies solely on the gravitational waveform, is applicable to any waveform model, and has the correct Newtonian limit. In this work, we extend this definition to spin-precessing systems. This simple yet effective extension relies on first transforming the waveform from the inertial frame to the coprecessing frame, and then adopting an amplitude and a phase with reduced spin-induced effects. Our method includes a robust procedure for filtering out spin-induced modulations, which become non-negligible in the small eccentricity and large spin-precession regime. Finally, we apply our method to a set of Numerical Relativity and Effective One Body waveforms to showcase its robustness for generic eccentric spin-precessing binaries. We make our method public via Python implementation in \texttt{gw\_eccentricity}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.08345,
  title  = {Defining eccentricity for spin-precessing binaries},
  author = {Md Arif Shaikh and Vijay Varma and Antoni Ramos-Buades and Harald P. Pfeiffer and Michael Boyle and Lawrence E. Kidder and Mark A. Scheel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.08345},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

35 pages, 16 + 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:56:05.171Z