English

The Fast and the Frame-Dragging: Efficient waveforms for asymmetric-mass eccentric equatorial inspirals into rapidly-spinning black holes

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology 2026-04-21 v3 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

Observations of gravitational-wave signals emitted by compact binary inspirals provide unique insights into their properties, but their analysis requires accurate and efficient waveform models. Intermediate- and extreme-mass-ratio inspirals (I/EMRIs), with mass ratios q102q \gtrsim 10^2, are promising sources for future detectors such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). Modelling waveforms for these asymmetric-mass binaries is challenging, entailing the tracking of many harmonic modes over thousands to millions of cycles. The FastEMRIWaveforms (FEW) modelling framework addresses this need, leveraging precomputation of mode data and interpolation to rapidly compute adiabatic waveforms for eccentric inspirals into zero-spin black holes. In this work, we extend FEW to model eccentric equatorial inspirals into black holes with spin magnitudes a0.999|a| \leq 0.999. Our model supports eccentricities e<0.9e < 0.9 and semi-latus recta p<200p < 200, enabling the generation of long-duration IMRI waveforms, and produces waveforms in 100\sim 100 ms with hardware acceleration. Characterising systematic errors, we estimate that our model attains mismatches of 105\sim 10^{-5} (for LISA sensitivity) with respect to error-free adiabatic waveforms over most of parameter space. We find that kludge models introduce errors in signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) as great as 40%+60%^{+60\%}_{-40\%} and induce marginal biases of up to 1σ\sim 1\sigma in parameter estimation. We show LISA's horizon redshift for I/EMRI signals varies significantly with aa, reaching a redshift of 33 (1515) for EMRIs (IMRIs) with only minor (10%)(\sim10\%) dependence on ee for an SNR threshold of 20. For signals with SNR 50\sim 50, spin and eccentricity-at-plunge are measured with uncertainties of δa107\delta a \sim 10^{-7} and δef105\delta e_f \sim 10^{-5}. This work advances the state-of-the-art in waveform generation for asymmetric-mass binaries.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.09470,
  title  = {The Fast and the Frame-Dragging: Efficient waveforms for asymmetric-mass eccentric equatorial inspirals into rapidly-spinning black holes},
  author = {Christian E. A. Chapman-Bird and Lorenzo Speri and Zachary Nasipak and Ollie Burke and Michael L. Katz and Alessandro Santini and Shubham Kejriwal and Philip Lynch and Josh Mathews and Hassan Khalvati and Jonathan E. Thompson and Soichiro Isoyama and Scott A. Hughes and Niels Warburton and Alvin J. K. Chua and Maxime Pigou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.09470},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

64 pages, 32 figures. See https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15630565 for the FEW code, and https://zenodo.org/records/15631641 for a data release accompanying this work. Updated with printed version