Observation of eccentric binary black hole mergers with second and third generation gravitational wave detector networks

Understand

[Abridged] We introduce an improved version of the Eccentric, Non-spinning, Inspiral-Gaussian-process Merger Approximant (ENIGMA) waveform model.

• We find that this ready-to-use model can: (i) produce physically consistent signals when sampling over 1M samples chosen over the $m_{\{1,\,2\}}\in[5M_{\odot},\,50M_{\odot}]$ parameter space, and the entire range of binary inclination angles; (ii) produce waveforms within 0.04 seconds from an initial gravitational wave frequency $f_{\textrm{GW}} =15\,\textrm{Hz}$ and at a sample rate of 8192 Hz; and (iii) reproduce the physics of quasi-circular mergers.
• We utilize ENIGMA to compute the expected signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) distributions of eccentric binary black hole mergers assuming the existence of second and third generation gravitational wave detector networks that include the twin LIGO detectors, Virgo, KAGRA, LIGO-India, a LIGO-type detector in Australia, Cosmic Explorer, and the Einstein Telescope.
• In the context of advanced LIGO-type detectors, we find that the SNR of eccentric mergers is always larger than quasi-circular mergers for systems with $e_0\leq0.4$ at $f_{\textrm{GW}} =10\,\textrm{Hz}$, even if the timespan of eccentric signals is just a third of quasi-circular systems with identical total mass and mass-ratio.