Gravitational Wave Peeps from EMRIs and their Implication for LISA Signal Confusion Noise

Abstract

Scattering events around the center of massive galaxies will occasionally toss a stellar-mass compact object into an orbit around the massive black hole at the center, beginning an extreme mass ratio inspiral. The early stages of such a highly eccentric orbit are not likely to produce detectable gravitational waves, as the source will only be in a suitable frequency band briefly when it is close to periapsis during each long-period orbit. This repeated burst of emission, firmly in the millihertz band, is the gravitational wave peep. While a single peep is not likely to be detectable, if we consider an ensemble of such subthreshold sources, spread across the universe, together they may produce an unresolvable background noise that could obscure sources otherwise detectable by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. Previous studies of the extreme mass ratio signal confusion background focused either on parabolic orbits near the massive black hole or events closer to merger. We seek to improve this characterization by implementing numerical kludge waveforms that can calculate highly eccentric orbits with relativistic effects. Our focus is on orbits at the point of capture that are farther away from the massive black hole. Here we present the waveforms and spectra of peeps generated from recent calculations of extreme mass ratio inspirals/bursts capture parameters and discuss how these can be used to estimate the signal confusion noise generated by such events. We demonstrate the effects of changing the orbital parameters on the resulting spectra as well as showing direct comparisons to parabolic orbits and why the gravitational wave ``peep" needs to be studied further. The results of this study will be expanded upon in a further paper that aims to provide an update on the EMRI signal confusion noise problem.

25 pages, 13 figures

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• Gravitational Wave Peep Contributions to Background Signal Confusion Noise for LISA
• Prospects for detecting asteroid-mass primordial black holes in extreme mass-ratio inspirals with continuous gravitational waves