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Eccentric Binary Neutron Star Search Prospects for Cosmic Explorer

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2021-09-21 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We determine the ability of Cosmic Explorer, a proposed third-generation gravitational-wave observatory, to detect eccentric binary neutron stars and to measure their eccentricity. We find that for a matched-filter search, template banks constructed using binaries in quasi-circular orbits are effectual for eccentric neutron star binaries with e70.004e_{7} \leq 0.004 (e70.003e_{7} \leq 0.003) for CE1 (CE2), where e7e_7 is the binary's eccentricity at a gravitational-wave frequency of 7~Hz. We show that stochastic template placement can be used to construct a matched-filter search for binaries with larger eccentricities and construct an effectual template bank for binaries with e70.05e_{7} \leq 0.05. We show that the computational cost of both the search for binaries in quasi-circular orbits and eccentric orbits is not significantly larger for Cosmic Explorer than for Advanced LIGO and is accessible with present-day computational resources. We investigate Cosmic Explorer's ability to distinguish between circular and eccentric binaries. We estimate that for a binary with a signal-to-noise ratio of 8 (800), Cosmic Explorer can distinguish between a circular binary and a binary with eccentricity e7102e_7 \gtrsim 10^{-2} (10310^{-3}) at 90% confidence.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2103.14088,
  title  = {Eccentric Binary Neutron Star Search Prospects for Cosmic Explorer},
  author = {Amber K. Lenon and Duncan A. Brown and Alexander H. Nitz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.14088},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

8 pages, 7 figures, supplemental materials at https://github.com/gwastro/cosmic-explorer-bns-eccentricity, revised to match version accepted by PRD

R2 v1 2026-06-24T00:34:04.581Z