The imprint of gas on gravitational waves from LISA intermediate-mass black hole binaries

Abstract

We study the effect of torques on circular inspirals of intermediate-mass black hole binaries (IMBHBs) embedded in gas discs, wherein both BH masses are in the range $10^2$-$10^5{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$, up to redshift $z=10$. We focus on how torques impact the detected gravitational wave (GW) waveform in the frequency band of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) when the binary separation is within a few hundred Schwarzschild radii. For a sub-Eddington accretion disc with a viscosity coefficient $\alpha =0.01$, surface density $\Sigma \approx 10^5$ g cm${}^{-2}$, and Mach number ${\mathcal{M}}_{\mathrm{a}}\approx 80$, a gap, or a cavity, opens when the binary is in the LISA band. Depending on the torque's strength, LISA will observe dephasing in the IMBHB's GW signal up to either $z\sim 5$ for high mass ratios ($q\approx 0.1$) or to $z\sim 7$ for $q\approx 10^{-3}$. We study the dependence of the measurable dephasing on variations of BH masses, redshift, and accretion rates. Our results suggest that phase shift is detectable even in high-redshift ($z=10$) binaries, provided that they experience super-Eddington accretion episodes. We investigate if the disc-driven torques can result in an observable `time-dependent' chirp mass with a simplified Fisher formalism, finding that, at the expected signal-to-noise ratio, the gas-induced variation of the chirp mass is too small to be detected. This work shows how perturbations of vacuum waveforms induced by gas should be strong enough to be detected by LISA for the IMBHB in the early inspiral phase. These perturbations encode precious information on the astrophysics of accretion discs and galactic nuclei. High-accuracy waveform models which incorporate these effects will be needed to extract such information.

Accepted by MNRAS

References in corpus (41)

• Array Programming with NumPy
• GW190521: A Binary Black Hole Merger with a Total Mass of $150M_{\odot }$
• UV Luminosity Functions at redshifts z~4 to z~10: 10000 Galaxies from HST Legacy Fields
• Gravitational-wave sensitivity curves
• Active Galactic Nuclei: what's in a name?
• Can environmental effects spoil precision gravitational-wave astrophysics?
• Accretion disc viscosity: how big is alpha?
• Supermassive black hole formation during the assembly of pre-galactic discs
• Pōniuā'ena: A Luminous $z=7.5$ Quasar Hosting a 1.5 Billion Solar Mass Black Hole
• The Population of Viscosity- and Gravitational Wave-Driven Supermassive Black Hole Binaries Among Luminous AGN
• Observational evidence for intermediate-mass black holes
• Observational Constraints on Black Hole Spin
• Formation of massive black holes in rapidly growing pre-galactic gas clouds
• LISA detections of massive black hole inspirals: parameter extraction errors due to inaccurate template waveforms
• The imprint of massive black hole formation models on the LISA data stream
• The Migration of Gap-Opening Planets is not Locked to Viscous Disk Evolution
• On disc protoplanet interactions in a non-barotropic disc with thermal diffusion
• Observational appearance of inefficient accretion flows and jets in 3D GRMHD simulations: Application to Sgr~A*
• Hydrodynamic Torques in Circumbinary Accretion Disks
• Circumbinary Accretion from Finite and Infinite Disks
• The erratic dynamical life of black hole seeds in high-redshift galaxies
• Binary Black Hole Accretion During Inspiral and Merger
• Orbital Evolution of Equal-mass Eccentric Binaries due to a Gas Disk: Eccentric Inspirals and Circular Outspirals
• LISA extreme-mass-ratio inspiral events as probes of the black hole mass function
• The formation of compact massive self-gravitating discs in metal-free haloes with virial temperatures of ~ 13000-30000 K
• On the gap-opening criterion of migrating planets in protoplanetary disks
• Eccentricity evolution of compact binaries and applications to gravitational-wave physics
• The electromagnetic chirp of a compact binary black hole: a phase template for the gravitational wave inspiral
• Light, medium-weight or heavy? The nature of the first supermassive black hole seeds
• A Survey of Disc Thickness and Viscosity in Circumbinary Accretion: Binary Evolution, Variability, and Disc Morphology
• Preventing Anomalous Torques in Circumbinary Accretion Simulations
• The Formation of Very Massive Stars in Early Galaxies and Implications for Intermediate Mass Black Holes
• Resolving massive black hole binaries evolution via adaptive particle-splitting
• Mass, Spin, and Ultralight Boson Constraints from the Intermediate Mass Black Hole in the Tidal Disruption Event 3XMM J215022.4-055108
• Dwarf galaxies might not be the birth sites of supermassive black holes
• Multi-messenger-Athena Synergy White Paper
• Binary evolution, gravitational-wave mergers and explosive transients in multiple-populations gas-enriched globular-clusters
• Superposed metric for spinning black hole binaries approaching merger
• Improved gravitational radiation time-scales II: spin-orbit contributions and environmental perturbations
• Radio Power from Direct-Collapse Black Holes
• Retrieving the True Masses of Gravitational-wave Sources

Cited by in corpus (1)

• A multi-parameter expansion for the evolution of asymmetric binaries in astrophysical environments