Stellar-mass binary black holes in circumbinary disks: smoking-gun signatures in LISA

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Isobel Romero-Shaw (DAMTP)
• Monday 28 October 2024, 14:00-15:00
• MR14 DAMTP and online.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Loren E. Held.

The LIGO -Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration has so far announced the gravitational-wave detections of about 80 binary black hole mergers. Each contains black holes with masses between 5 and 100 solar masses, putting them in the stellar-mass black hole range. Despite the wealth of detections, the formation channels of these binaries remain a mystery: are the components born together as a stellar binary in isolation, evolving slowly over millennia via mass transfer and/or a common envelope phase before merging as compact objects? Or do they become bound due to dynamical interactions in densely populated environments, like star clusters and AGN disks? With only the final few moments before the merger visible to us with the current generation of ground-based gravitational wave detectors, these questions are hard to answer. However, future-space-based detectors like LISA , operating at orders-of-magnitude lower frequencies, will reveal much earlier stages in the lives of these binaries. With LISA due to launch in 2035 – several years before the likely start date of next-generation ground-based detectors – this instrument is poised to shed unique light on the longstanding question of stellar-mass binary black hole merger formation. In this talk, I review the current status of gravitational-wave detections and suggest constraints on their origins from current detectors. I then focus on binary black holes with circumbinary disks, and the characteristic marks these disks could leave on the eccentricities of stellar-mass binary black holes sweeping through the LISA band. I show that these eccentric signatures are detectable in LISA , and may have a smoking-gun relationship with mass ratio. However, these eccentricities may lead disk-driven binaries to be mistaken for those that are dynamically assembled, risking mistaken inference of formation channels and rates if the effects of circumbinary disks are not considered.

This talk is part of the DAMTP Astrophysics Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All CMS events
• CMS Events
• Cambridge Astronomy Talks
• Cosmology, Astrophysics and General Relativity
• DAMTP Astrophysics Seminars
• DAMTP info aggregator
• Interested Talks
• MR14 DAMTP and online
• bld31

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.