Detectability of stochastic gravitational wave background from weakly hyperbolic encounters

Understand

We compute the stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background generated by black hole-black hole (BH-BH) hyperbolic encounters with eccentricities close to one and compare them with the respective sensitivity curves of planned GW detectors.

• We use the Keplerian potential to model the orbits of the encounters and the quadrupole formula to compute the emitted GWs.
• We take into account hyperbolic encounters that take place in clusters up to redshift $5$ and with BH masses spanning from $5 M_{\odot}$ to $55 M_{\odot}$.
• We assume the clusters to be virialized and study several cluster models with different mass and virial velocity, and finally obtain an accumulative result, displaying the background as an average.