Proposed search for the detection of gravitational waves from eccentric binary black holes

Most compact binary systems are expected to circularize before the frequency of emitted gravitational waves (GWs) enters the sensitivity band of the ground based interferometric detectors. However, several mechanisms have been proposed for the formation of binary systems, which retain eccentricity throughout their lifetimes. Since no matched-filtering algorithm has been developed to extract continuous GW signals from compact binaries on orbits with low to moderate values of eccentricity, and available algorithms to detect binaries on quasicircular orbits are suboptimal to recover these events, in this paper we propose a search method for detection of gravitational waves produced from the coalescences of eccentric binary black holes (eBBH). We study the search sensitivity and the false alarm rates on a segment of data from the second joint science run of LIGO and Virgo detectors, and discuss the implications of the eccentric binary search for the advanced GW detectors.

Figure 1

Distribution of coherent network amplitude, $\eta$, for the time shift-analysis performed over S6D (LHV) network.

Figure 2

The effective range $R_{\mathrm{eff}}$ in Mpc over component mass bin: S6D L1H1V1 network. The dotted contours represent constant mass ratio(q) and chirp mass($M_{\text{chirp}}$). Overall, the sensitive distance increases with the increase in the chirp mass and decrease in the mass ratio ($q$).

Figure 3

Efficiency vs eccentricity at an orbital frequency of 24 Hz. Injections were made for three different masses. Heavier binaries show minor increase in efficiency with increasing eccentricity (efficiency values depend on the chosen injection distance). There is no visible trend for lower mass binaries.