English

Ringdown amplitudes of nonspinning eccentric binaries

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2024-10-22 v3 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

Closed-form expressions for the ringdown complex amplitudes of nonspinning unequal-mass binaries in arbitrarily eccentric orbits are presented. They are built upon 237 numerical simulations contained within the RIT catalog, through the parameterisation introduced in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 132, 101401]. Global fits for the complex amplitudes, associated to linear quasinormal mode frequencies of the dominant ringdown modes, are obtained in a factorised form immediately applicable to any existing quasi-circular model. Similarly to merger amplitudes, ringdown ones increase by more than 50% compared to the circular case for high impact parameters (medium eccentricities), while strongly suppressed in the low impact parameter (highly eccentric) limit. Such reduction can be explained by a transition between an "orbital-type" and an "infall-type" dynamics. The amplitudes (phases) fits accuracy lies around a few percent (deciradians) for the majority of the dataset, comparable to the accuracy of current state-of-the-art quasi-circular ringdown models, and well within current statistical errors of current LIGO-Virgo-Kagra ringdown observations. These expressions constitute another building block towards the construction of complete general-relativistic inspiral-merger-ringdown semi-analytical templates, and allow to extend numerically-informed spectroscopic analyses beyond the circular limit. Such generalisations are key to achieve accurate inference of compact binaries astrophysical properties, and tame astrophysical systematics within observational investigations of strong-field general relativistic dynamics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.19442,
  title  = {Ringdown amplitudes of nonspinning eccentric binaries},
  author = {Gregorio Carullo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.19442},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

20 pages, 11 figures | v3: published version, minor edits

R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:21:51.480Z