English

Detecting Accelerating Eccentric Binaries in the LISA Band

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2023-02-22 v2 Astrophysics of Galaxies General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

Many gravitational wave (GW) sources in the LISA band are expected to have non-negligible eccentricity. Furthermore, many of them can undergo acceleration because they reside in the presence of a tertiary. Here we develop analytical and numerical methods to quantify how the compact binary's eccentricity enhances the detection of its peculiar acceleration. We show that the general relativistic precession pattern can disentangle the binary's acceleration-induced frequency shift from the chirp-mass-induced frequency shift in GW template fitting, thus relaxing the signal-to-noise ratio requirement for distinguishing the acceleration by a factor of 1010010\sim100. Moreover, by adopting the GW templates of the accelerating eccentric compact binaries, we can enhance the acceleration measurement accuracy by a factor of 100\sim100, compared to the zero-eccentricity case, and detect the source's acceleration even if it does not change during the observational time. For example, a stellar-mass binary black hole (BBH) with moderate eccentricity in the LISA band yields an error of the acceleration measurement 107ms2\sim10^{-7}m\cdot s^{-2} for SNR=20\rm{SNR}=20 and observational time of 44 yrs. In this example, we can measure the BBHs' peculiar acceleration even when it is 1pc\sim1\rm pc away from a 4×106M4\times 10^{6}\rm M_{\odot} SMBH. Our results highlight the importance of eccentricity to the LISA-band sources and show the necessity of developing GW templates for accelerating eccentric compact binaries.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2210.03129,
  title  = {Detecting Accelerating Eccentric Binaries in the LISA Band},
  author = {Zeyuan Xuan and Smadar Naoz and Xian Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.03129},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

15 pages (+references), 9 figures. Accepted by PRD

R2 v1 2026-06-28T02:57:25.756Z